SubPoli: A Disorganized Defense of Anarchism

I have a lot of fondness for anarchism as a school of thought. First and foremost its proponents tend to be more fun to talk to and much less concerned with who’s in charge for obvious reasons. It’s also an excellent position to take to critique the existence and validity of power structures. Why do we need police, laws, governance? What do we get, what do we lose? Not just the question of who should be in charge but why anyone should be in charge.

Would it work on a large scale? On a small scale? At all? Am I even willing to describe myself as an anarchist?

I dunno.

But I will say that many of the criticisms I see of anarchism are…weak. Either begging the question through a lack of imagination, or a categorical misunderstanding of the functions of governance, or a very specific definition of a productive economy. And honestly, I see them repeated often.

So, below please find a ramshackle collection of my responses to a lot of the more commonly repeated criticisms of anarchy.

One useful distinction to be had in these conversations is between abstract concepts (in this case, hypothetical political and economic arrangements) and actual reforms or strategies to change a real currently existing society.

For example, we can plan out ways in which a communal farm might work best (abstract), while also being aware that we currently have no ability to get the land we need (concrete). Or we might consider ways that we can reform the local police (concrete), while also acknowledging that policing is inherently violent and irredeemable (abstract).

In both cases, you don’t stop one cycle of thought simply because it doesn’t satisfy the other. They’re undertaking different, interrelated tasks.

In the case of thinking of such sweeping things as political theories, the abstraction can become quite utopian, as we dream of alternate ways of being and living and relating. There’s a real question of if any anarchist society could ever come into being, and persist once it does. There’s also a question as to how long democracies can persist and how long dictators can rule before getting what they deserve. If we limit ourselves only to that which we are sure to be able to accomplish, we will cut ourselves off from any possible new futures.

For the purposes of this essay, in its desire to be as general as possible, we won’t be dealing with much in the concrete. Suffice to say, our goal is to consider what things are possible under an anarchist organizing theory. Not whether or not Canada (or any other OECD country) will ever be an anarchist society.

There are as many anarchisms as there are anarchists, but just so we have something to talk about and I can’t just no-true-scotsman my way out of any dead ends, lets lay down some principles, if not definitions.

I feel like we can reliably say an anarchist organizational theory will be:

1. Horizontal: Not dependent on permanent ordered ranks of human beings for stability or decision making.

2. Egalitarian : The fruits of the society are distributed in some way that the participants feel to be fair, if not outright evenly.

3. Consensual: People cannot be used as means to an end. No one is coerced to action, participation or even membership.

4. Productive: It’s an easy thing for there to be no rules if scarcity has been magic’d away (like if robots, AI, or enslaved people do all the work for us), but for an anarchist theory to not just be an all-inclusive resort there has to be an idea of how people will work to feed and house each other.

There’s a bunch of other things that I personally would like (no private property, no cops, no organizations that outlast their constituent members, no heavy industry, no money) but I think those 4 should give us a good baseline to deal with most anarchisms.

The same way anarchists will do anything, through a series of tiresome meetings.

Part of the problem may be that we often don’t see coordination (or management) as a professional skill the same way we might see welding or carpentry or computer coding as a skill. But if the coordinator is just another kind of worker, and not a member of some sort of overseer-caste, then it becomes a little easier to see how this might work. If the miner, the truck driver, the chemical refiner and the factory worker are all equals, why wouldn’t the shipping clerk be?

Your farming collective needs machine parts for the tractor, your procuring agent (who might just be one of your planters who’s particularly good at talking to folks) reaches out to their counterpart at the machinist collective, who reaches out to their counterpart at the metalworks and so on. This is purposely general, as different anarchisms have differing ideas towards trade, currency, and generalized reciprocity. For now we can say that a horizontally organized society is not necessarily unable to manage a supply chain.

Which really brings us to the third issue, what would KEEP that from happening in an anarchist economy. And while I can’t guarantee it, I would say that principles 1-3 , would be the safeguards against that. Price gouging, arbitrage, hoarding and predatory capitalism are all attractive and possible only in circumstances where a person or small group of people is able to exert control over the fruits of labour of others. In a situation without that ability to exert that control, where the fruits of the labour of society is distributed fairly (whatever that might mean) and where no one is placed above another person for ‘owning’ more, what’s the point of having more than you need?

Who cares if you cornered the market on apples? Even presuming you can keep the rest of us from just taking them, all you’re doing is being an asshole sitting on a mountain of rotting fruit that no one will do business with again. And we’re having peaches this season.

In order for power and dominance to be attractive, it has to be possible.

This is actually a real problem. Mass production of component equipment needs to follow certain standards and practices or else repair and replacement become extremely difficult. I need to know what the resistance of a given resistor or the capacitance of a given capacitor in order to install it.

This is one area where the enforcement may just come down to common agreement. In the case of resistors and capacitors there is an industry standard that all producers agree on simply because if they go rogue and start using a different notation system, they gain no advantage and it vastly inconveniences using their product. To be able to participate may require just going with whatever arbitrary decisions were made by the industry up until now.

As an example of how such an industry would be able to change: In the linux operating system the standard display system is an X server. It’s been upgraded and modified and repatched multiple times by multiple teams working independently on their own time to keep it up for decades.

Recently, a new system has started to take prominence, Wayland, which may be able to replace X and is better able to take advantage of new technology. How can the transition be made from one to the other for the community, without profit driven competitive markets or central planning to force the new standard?

The answer is, slowly, by choice as people and developers switch, and in the meantime, Wayland includes an X emulator so it can run programs not designed for it.

The point is, it’s possible for whole industries to standardize themselves slowly along the lines of best practices. A good idea is a good idea, and the laws of physics know no brand name.

This is rather than developing your own proprietary technology and setting it up so it will only work with your products for the express purpose of trying to force a monopoly.

There is a legitimate version of this criticism (or one I take seriously) and an illegitimate one. So let’s get the easy one out of the way:

And the answer is, we either do without it, compensate it fairly, and stop actively humiliating people who do it. A lot of ‘low’ work is extremely important and difficult, waste management, physical labour, front line healthcare. We have created systems of shaming these people to KEEP their labour cheap so we CAN coerce them. In a sense, the calculation is backwards, we want to be able to abuse servers in restaurants as servants, so we make sure they’re paid poorly (relative to the customers) and therefore dependent on our good opinion.

If garbage collection ceases in a major city it is uninhabitable within weeks. If police go on strike… things might get wild but the city is still habitable. We need people in waste management to be underpaid and embarrassed by their work so they’ll stay out of sight and not remind us of the waste produced by our lives.

So in short, in a materially egalitarian society, gross work would be regarded as necessary and praiseworthy and rewarded fairly. In a horizontally structured society, there’d be no looking down on people for doing gross necessary work. And in a consent based society, there’d be no forcing people to do jobs that exist purely to boost the egos of customers. (You might still have servers and restaurants, but you’d best be saying please and thank you).

That’s the easy one, an anarchist society is structurally distinct from our current hierarchical society so therefore the issue of underpaid, gross, coerced labour is avoided categorically. If you don’t have classes, you can’t have an underclass.

The next ones are harder:

We can’t have reputation alone decide who is and is not a doctor, the damage one convincing con man could do to a community before being tracked and stopped would be immense. And a layman wouldn’t be able to judge the knowledge or work of a medical doctor, until it was too late and people started dying.

Conversely, if we allow professional organizations to decide licensing and knowledge bases without oversight, they could resist scientific evidence based on a collective bias, or begin to support junk science due to some form of corruption. Not to mention they would exert outsized control over the public, I’m not looking to trade presidents and kings just for the most well regarded doctor’s and judges and generals to seize control.

A proliferation of schools of thought may be necessary, a variety of competing professional disciplines organized around given underlying philosophies (faith healers, chiropractors, TCMs, allopathic medicine) and we may just have to accept that it will be up to us to decide which ones are the best for us in any given situation. Within each school of thought they may decide who is the best or worst practitioner, but ultimately I will be the one deciding which school to approach, and which practitioner to use.

While this may mean that my cousin who believes in homeopathy will die of cancer, and my friend will turn down a vaccine that would save their child’s life, it also means that we are not coerced to receive any particular treatment either, due to the professional organization deciding its what’s best for it.

The responsibility for vetting a professional will unfortunately fall to the individual, with guidance from their larger community. The hope being though that there will be less motivation to lie and misrepresent yourself as there will be no benefit of wealth or status to do so, and that the sense of personal responsibility will also engender a degree of critical thinking.

If you’re no longer spending all your days believing what you’re told by your ‘betters’ it may be harder for a conman to trick you with some fast fancy talk. And if your a conman and incompetent who’s patients keep dying, without a professional organization to protect you, eventually their families will catch up to you.

Some work is necessary, and you can only do it for a few years and after those years you can’t do much else. Some work is necessary and dangerous and a single mistake can drastically shorten your life span or disable you completely. And even if you’re doing neither of those kinds of job, everyone eventually gets too old for the job.

So, basically, do we reward those who don’t work? If it’s based on work that HAS been done, who decides what is worth being rewarded in perpetuity? And what about retirement? And what about, for lack of a better phrase, lazy, useless fuckups?

This comes down to how we decide to disburse the goods of a society, and what the individual members think is ‘Fair”. Every system would handle this differently, but I would say that an urge towards general disbursement would be the safest, fairest and the least likely to form an overclass or corrupt central party. If everyone is entitled to what they need and want to the extent that their community can provide it, then you are as well compensated breaking rocks in the mines as you are relaxing on a beach when you’re too old to work.

You might ask if people will simply not work then, and yes I think that’s possible, but as in the conversation about ‘gross and unpleasant’ work, we have to then ask, is it NECESSARY work? If it is, if it’s dangerous and hard but it will help our community survive and thrive, I think you will find people willing to do it. If for no other reason than that benefit is shared equally, so what’s good for all is also good for me as a member of all. And on top of that the social glory of being one of our heroes could have non material rewards.

One of the reasons we have to coerce people to do dangerous work is they so often do not gain the direct benefit of their labour. We need to turn rifles on the miners because they know they’re dying to make another person rich. Think how hard people work at their own businesses, their own kitchen gardens, their volunteer organizations. When YOU are going to enjoy the fruits of your labour, not an investor, you’ll work harder.

Further, as the workers of dangerous jobs in an anarchist society are in closer control of their work and its form, they can take steps to make the work safer, as they’re not motivated to value profit over safety, unlike the bosses.

And as for the fuckups. Well… look, some of us just aren’t good workers and that’s just how it is. Some of those bad workers are wonderful parents, loyal friends, good drinking buddies or just a lot of fun to be around. And even if they’re not, they may paint a bunch of sunflowers for us, posthumously publish amazing fiction, or inspiinge others to great acts by your company and lived outlook.

While we might resent those who don’t work but gain benefit, we have plenty of examples of folks who don’t work and receive benefit directly from our work, or who are granted positions of power and influence by virtue of birth, or who just won the lottery.

At least the town drunk and I can go have a good night out sometimes. My landlord would never, and I still have to support him and his family.

So the funny (not ha ha funny, more ‘Oh God’ funny) is that lynch mobs usually involved the police. And were often whipped up for the benefit of the ownership class to keep people in their place.

Mob rule in emergencies is a lot less violent and a lot more people being violently prevented from getting life saving materials by private mercenaries and cops.

Simply put, if most of the property in your society is communal, you’re really just stealing from yourself. If a society is horizontal the power you can gain over another person is limited, if existent at all. If the community is based on consent and having the right to do as you please with the willing as a corner stone, than a lot of crimes (drug use, sex work) stop being crimes.

Let’s work through an example of a real problem, say I beat the piss out of my neighbour.

First up, why?

Did I do it to rob him, am I hungry, am I deprived? This immediately brings into question considerations as to how property is handled in our hypothetical society. Can I own something? What does it mean to own something? Is there a material inequity that I sought to address? If our anarchist society is materially egalitarian, then the solution is to address the inequality, hook me up with the services I need. And then get me to apologize.

Did I do it due to an interpersonal conflict? Most people tend to avoid physical violence even without the threat of reprisal or punishment from the state, unless the stakes are extremely one sided physically I am not emerging from a fight unscathed. So it seems like this conflict has hit some sort of boiling point and presumably has been going on for a while with both of us being intractable. So then the question is again, why? why are we unable to come to some kind of consensus? In this case, as we are unable to resolve our problems our society may have to mediate, or just leave us to our disagreement if we’re so committed to fighting each other.

In the case that the violence is extremely one sided, say my neighbour is quite old, then this is a situation of abuse. Abuse can be undertaken for its own sake, there are people who delight in cruelty and most people get at least some enjoyment of having power over others even if they also feel sick at the same time.

I will say that there is a narrative about abuse that its generally people who feel powerless otherwise taking what power they can by exploiting or abusing those who they are stronger than, and in a horizontal society there might be a lot less of that just because there's less feeling powerless at all.

But if the fact is I just delight in cruelty and/or I wish to hold power over another, that I robbed and beat my neighbour for no other reason than for him to have less so I would be able to put myself over him, if I treated him as a means to my own end...then I'm not a very good anarchist am I?

The community should probably run my ass out of town or kill me.

In most jurisprudence, when you break a ‘law’ you’re not just hurting the person you hurt (if you hurt someone at all), you are trespassing against the community. In a criminal case it’s the crown (or the state) against the offender. In a, horizontal, egalitarian, consensual, productive society you are still trespassing against the community when you injure a community member. The difference is the community as a whole judges you, not the crown.

A lack of organized criminal due process could be absolutely disastrous. But it also means that if my wife shows up to work with a black eye her coworkers will be dragging me out into the street before lunch, not waiting for the police to do it when they get around to it. A lot of crime is covered up, ignored or just not pursued by our current ministers of justice.

In my mind, this is the real obstacle of any anarchist organization. I’m pretty sure just about anyone can figure out how to manage a small org horizontally. How do you address wrongdoing? How do you address accusations?

If the society/organization is truly horizontal, egalitarian, consensual and productive, if each member truly feels belonging and responsibility for it, then a lot of the reasons to falsely accuse someone of a crime to whip up a mob against them go by the wayside. And a lot of the reasons to commit a ‘crime’ become a lot less pressing.

The reality is, cops don’t keep you safe right now. The law doesn’t keep you safe.

Your neighbours aren’t held back from murdering and robbing you by the threat of the law, they’re held back by having little to no desire to. Most people with money are terrified of the poor, despite most unhoused people being elderly and/or disabled, because they DO have a reason to rob and harm you, even if they have no ability.

The law provides a framework of property and personal rights that can be enforced violently on occasion when folks need a reminder. And that’s not even touching the abolitionist argument that police are shockingly ineffective at catching criminals.

So how would due process work? A better question might be better put as, what work does due process do for us now?

Due process, in the abstract, creates a ritual by which we can agree on what happened and what should happen. It’s a way to support our individual rights and decide when those rights should be stripped away.

For democratic nations, the law is decided upon by a legislature representative of the will of the people (through some sort of ritual) and then applied and interpreted by a separate body of people imbued with some sort of special knowledge (the courts).

Due process and legal proceedings are therefore ways of regulating and making consistent and predictable, the will of the people. The rituals and processes are slow enough, clear enough and transparent enough that we can expect within reason their activity.

But they also often fail. And fail horribly.

A factor in anarchism may just be that the law and the courts are inconsistent. That when an infraction against the good of others or a disagreement has hit a high enough level the whole community must come together and discuss it and decide as a whole what they can live with. Be that accepting a murderer in our midst because we felt they had good enough reason, or declaring a promise(contract) void because it’s fulfillment is unreasonable.

As a result, such a system will inevitably allow the charismatic and well liked more power and freedom than others. But right now it’s just if you’re rich and can afford a better lawyer. Or if the judge is sympathetic to you as a ‘young man with a bright future ahead of you’.

The goal of due process, a harmonious society, may be better served by an inconsistent collective process than by a top down imposition of laws and judgement. Especially if our anarchist society is horizontal, equal, consensual and productive. The reasons to ‘game the system’ are fewer than in our current hierarchical society. Can’t climb a ladder that’s not there after all.

I dunno, how well would my country do if invaded today?

In all honesty, if we’re taking similar logic to the last section on community violence and policing, then I think that to our victory and our doom its down to each individual citizen banding together with their neighbours to protect each other.

Von Clausewitz said of people’s armies, that under the right conditions, and purely for defense, that they were not to be trifled with, tho they could be defeated.

And Nestor Makhnov said of organizing anarchist militias, that it was challenging but they were effective as partisans and small units.

I’m not sure how comfortable I am with my more paranoid community members building an anti-aircraft installation and running ‘readiness drills’ whenever they feel like it. Or our intelligence service being made up of our most conspiratorially minded members. Or being expected to run around the woods practicing small squad tactics with my designated community protection group.

However, if we’re talking about a population all of whom feel a direct personal relationship to their freedom, not one defined by their relationship to a state that grants them that freedom contingent on its continuing existence, then while getting over the border and overrunning the militia may be easy, ruling such a people would be almost impossible.

Imagine if you’d never had a king, and some jackass walked up to you and explained that due to his great great grandfather being ordained by the pope he was now in charge. You wouldn’t stop laughing until he killed you.

A hierarchical nation is already conquered by its own rulers, nice or not. So when invaded and conquered a citizen is swapping one set of rulers for another. An anarchist society is unconquered to begin with, making an additional obstacle to its being dominated.

I can’t speak to whether or not tactics and military matters NEED hierarchical leadership, but I will point out that as we discussed in previous sections, someone being recognized as skilled in a particular area and listened to (dare I say obeyed) in that area, does not mean we necessarily make them a leader in all matters. And the lack of permanent hierarchy also means we don’t have officers who are selected as a matter of birth or wealth, with no real strategic insight.

So, is an anarchist society impossible? Do we need to be ruled?

I’d say an anarchist society presents a set of viable solutions to the problems that all societies have. It would still have many of the challenges and issues that most societies struggle with, which are why we have societies in the first place. But the individual citizen would have a greater individual responsibility and greater individual agency in that society. In an anarchist society, much of what you now passively depend on the government and your betters for, would be up to you to get and provide to others. For better or for worse.

So, yes it is possible, we don’t need to be ruled. A hierarchy is just one of many ways to organize a society.

Is it likely we’ll ever live in an anarchist society?

To get from here to there is a question for each individual anarchist theory, and its application to your own given life and times. The purpose of utopian thinking of this kind is not to help plan the revolution, it’s to present a position where we can ask when and where do we require authority driven structures? Why? What work are they doing? How else could they be arranged?

Once you start thinking along those lines, the possibility of and strength of small scale anarchist organizing becomes more clear. You can see how you might get more out of 10 people organized horizontally into a working group with no clear leader, than a 100 people all looking to the same one person to tell them what to do.

It also lets you see and glimpse a different world, and exposes how much work we’re doing right now, every day, to maintain the boot on our own necks.

We may never get to live in our anarchist world, but the mere possibility of its existence means that we aren’t inescapably trapped in a world of domination.