So in some ways, I was almost primed to be an anarchist by my own upbringing — once I had made the fundamental decision that government was indeed unjust, and once I began to explore that idea, I went through several phases.First and foremost you could have called me the typical anarcho-capitalist, but with one exception: I spent the majority of my college career studying philosophy and political science, and have a deep mistrust towards Ayn Rand; yet everywhere I turned I was running into Objectivists and Rand-ites. While I freely admit that this mistrust was instilled in me (you may or may not be surprised by the level of animosity that most higher education folks display towards Rand) nothing I read from the self-proclaimed Objectivists made me feel any differently then what my professors had taught me: Rand’s philosophy held some deep flaws that somehow seemed to be glossed over by her followers; assumptions about the way things are and would be under certain circumstances that I had a hard time jiving with what I myself had observed. And while Objectivists are not anarcho-capitalists, their influence on that strain of anarchism is profound.
So the entire time that I was looking at this an-cap philosophy, I felt somewhat dissatisfied – and I kept reading more and more about anarchism’s history, the various strands of it, etc. to try and pin down that dissatisfaction.
Eventually I found agorism, and I felt like I’d taken my next step. Here was a political philosophy that had a practical aspect to it: how to apply an-cap type beliefs in a practical manner. Early on I felt like an-caps were simply saying ‘this is how it should be’ without getting to much into the question of ‘how are we going to get there?’. Beyond the whole an-cap connection, what I liked a lot about agorism (and still do to this day) is that I don’t and didn’t find it to be exclusionary towards any particular brand of anarchism. There are an-cap agorists, mutualist agorists, and though I’ve yet to meet one, I see very little reason why you couldn’t have a lib-soc agorist (hell, I’m fairly close to a lib-soc agorist myself). Agorism was really the unifying thing that tied this whole anarchist milieu together for me.
But back to my own evolution as an anarchist, it was really agorism’s connection to mutualism (through the likes of Kevin Carson and company) that kept me moving through the various schools. After a while, I realized that I was perhaps closest to either a mutualist or a lib-soc – I was (and am) anti-capitalist, an individualist, a non-state socialist, believe in the idea of owning the products of ones labor, disavow the effectiveness (or morality) of the managerial culture, etc. Whether you make a semantic distinction between property and possession (as lib-soc’s do) or you simply call it all property but make moral distinctions (as mutualists do), I think that’s the correct way to look at things. I also believe in the power of a free-market, though in the vein of a mutualist free market, not the an-cap view.
So with all of that background in mind, I began to look even more critically at some of the claims and aims of the an-cap/voluntarist movement. Unlike some folks in the wider anarchist community (and perhaps because of my past associations) I don’t have the sense of hostility towards an-caps that many do; yes, I do in fact think they have a right to call themselves anarchists, and yes I do in fact find value in working with them (even if I do find some notions misguided or wrong). Whether you agree with them or not, there is a nobility to the non-agression principle that drives the anarcho-capitalist view; the idea of a society where people abhor the use of force and coercion is a beautiful one, no doubt.
But I also understand the critiques that many traditional anarchists level at the an-cap community: they focus on abolishing the State without worrying about or largely even discussing other power dichotomies and hierarchies (for the most part that is, I definitely acknowledge that I’m generalizing here and give credit to people like Brad Spangler and David Z from …nothirdsolution for being great exceptions to that rule). An-caps tend to fall back to contractual scenarios and the idea of consent vs. coercion as the end-all-be-all of every argument; and while I think there is merit to the consent/coercion side of the coin, there are MANY factors which make interactions much more complex then simply ‘you consented to this’ (these have been discussed elsewhere at length, but I may still do a post on this topic at some point).
So with all of that being said, this (long!) intro has lead me to something I’d like to seriously compliment the voluntaryist an-caps on: they are doing more direct-action in this world then I see most other anarchists participating in. There have always been direct action campaigns among anarchists of all stripes; whether it’s Food not Bombs, squatting and fighting for squatters rights, green anarchists fighting against big polluters, etc – these actions are part and parcel to anarchist culture.
But the problem I see is that they are limited in their scope. While it is most certainly beneficial to have an org like FnB, and they do great work, I feel like anarchism has reached a point where it’s time to start looking at the even larger picture. Having yearly protests at the G20/G8 is not big picture. Protesting in general is not big picture. The real problem I see is that a good portion of the anarchist community isn’t actually putting their collective wisdom where their mouths are and actually setting up the communities that they’d like to see; instead, they tend to be laser focused on the next protest.
I think the one over-arching thing that agorist thought has brought to the table, and that an-cap voluntaryists like those in Keene, NH have embraced, is an emphasis on action as the means to change. Not protest, not working on isolated issues, but anarchism as a praxis. Agorism puts an emphasis on building the new society within the old, until the new society eventually displaces or makes irrelevant the old. The focus in agorism is black market economy, that is a market free from the intervention of the State. And while you can argue until your blue in the face about how agorists are ‘wrong because they are propertarian’, or that they are ‘putting too much emphasis on economics’, you are missing a fundamental point: the idea that drives agorism, that of building the new within the old, is flat out, fucking brilliant and has practical applications in any and every strata of anarchist thought.
Are you a green anarchist? Work on land occupations of currently held private and government land, until there are enough people occupying that the corporation or state can’t feasibly remove them; and while you are occupying, begin to disseminate your reasons, educate society about what your aims are, and setup the collective society you envision.
Are you a primitivist? Work on building sustainable communities in the underpopulated regions of the globe, away from the technology you despise.
Do you believe that a barter economy is the only thing that is fair/just/equal? Then start working towards building up the barter economy, until it has the momentum to supplant the almighty dollar, gold, or any other form of currency.
See, the beauty of anarchism as a philosophy is that it doesn’t (or at least it shouldn’t when it does) specify which form of society will work. Right at this moment, the voluntaryists in Keene, NH have just signed their ‘Shire Society’ document – a document that declares them to be a voluntary society, and that declares them as no longer a part of the United States. Whether you agree with that or not, and believe me I have some doubts about the way it’s being done, as anarchists we need to see how amazing that is. The an-cap, agorist side of the Free Keene movement has progressed far enough to the point that they feel they are ready to essentially revoke their own forced membership in the State. That’s amazing! That’s anarchism as praxis, anarchism as a movement that is visible: it’s civil disobedience taken to the societal level. And unlike past ‘secession’ movements, it’s aim is not to create a new state, but a voluntary society of mutual respect and voluntary interaction. Even if you don’t think that voluntaryism on it’s own is enough to sustain a society, as many traditional anarchists would argue, you have to give them credit for at least TRYING to build something positive outside of State coercion.
The best thing that could happen to the anarchist movement as a whole, in my opinion, would be for every self-declared anarchist to start working with those around them that feel the same on building their own little vision of what society should look like. Some may fail, others may flourish, but in the end if we are all working together, and working to dismantle the power hierarchies that exist within our current culture, a natural balance will find itself.
Voltairine de Cleyre coined the term ‘anarchist without adjectives’ as a way to describe the anarchist movement as a whole, a way to bring solidarity to any and all that believed in human freedom from power structures and repression: it’s time we added a new term to follow that one: ‘anarchist with objectives’.
-Matt C
