More important than opposition to the current system is the prefiguration of an anarchic one. So much online discourse is about attacking, a lot less is about building. I drew this to remind myself and others that confronting the state is only a part of the puzzle and building new systems without it is also important.
Licence (as always): CC-0, No rights reserved.
That’s a grand old way of saying that anarchists should only be comfortable and content with being edgy propagandists.
So where are they, then? Where are these discussions taking place? Where is the theoretical discourse that makes preconfiguration an actual possibility happening?
Do you know of any?
You are not going to get the working class collectivised with nothing but empty propaganda. The working class isn’t dumb, you know… they will always side with that which is more concrete - you know, that very thing anarchists seem afraid to offer?
Are you not of “the people?” It seems to me that leaving all the really difficult stuff to “the people” has almost become an orthodox holy cow for anarchists these days… that must be why they assume screaming “organize!” at everybody will someday (somehow) magically raise anarchism from out of the political leper colony it presently finds itself in.
And why is that?
Oh, certain voices are coming together, all right… but the anarchist one doesn’t seem to be in the room where it’s happening, does it now?
Nobody is saying that they should.
Yes. I know. That’s why it isn’t working.
Says who? Some Beardy McDeadguy, perhaps?
Ie, an actual theoretical grounding? There are only so many ways in which you can build a building, you know - it doesn’t hurt to actually know that BEFORE you are forced into building it under the most exacting of conditions.
An anarchist society isn’t a building. It’s a tree. A living, breathing, perpetually growing organism. You cannot say what a tree will look like before it’s grown. You can only plant a seed and hope for the best. As soon as you start planning and designing parts of this society you start ignoring other peoples contribution, stifling their liberty and self-determination. State socialists are the ones who are designing society according to their own vision and we’ve all seen where that leads.
If you want an actual movement and momentum check what the IWW is doing. They claim to be anarchist/syndicalists but I don’t know how much we are represented in the actual ranks. I’m sadly in a country that doesn’t have a branch.
I am just one. I am limited by my skills and specialties. I cannot really contribute to the discussion of heavy industry or agriculture, unless it’s about using tech and computers to simplify or automate, but even then I would need to listen to the actual people in these industries to even begin designing something that works. I know IT, I know Computers, I know programming. I also think I’m relatively good at recourse management and coming up with solutions that others might not. Those are the areas I know I can contribute. I would love to start a tech-collective but I don’t have the contacts. That’s why I spend most of my time on here, it feels like the only place I can actually contribute. If a person actually has enough anarchists around them to actually do something they obviously should do something more than just spread propaganda, but I don’t.
Which is part of the problem. Anarchy cannot be concrete. It’s chaos compared to centralized power structures, a free society cannot be anything else. The difference between anarchists and statists is that we embrace the chaos and believe something incredible can exist within it, that collectively we can withstand anything bad that chaos throws at us. Any concrete societal structure can only be maintained with control. This control will often result in inequality and exploitation.
I also just found an essay on the anarchist library that deals with a lot of the topics we’ve discussed, perhaps give it a read: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/nishikant-sheorey-society-is-not-a-machine