Introduction to Anarchist Literature - Anarchy Works

This is merely an excerpt. Full text available in various formats at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works.

ANARCHY WORKS

There are hidden stories all around us,

growing in abandoned villages in the mountains

or vacant lots in the city,

petrifying beneath our feet in the remains

of societies like nothing we’ve known,

whispering to us that things could be different.

But the politician you know is lying to you,

the manager who hires and fires you,

the landlord who evicts you,

the president of the bank that owns your house,

the professor who grades your papers,

the cop who rolls your street,

the reporter who informs you,

the doctor who medicates you,

the husband who beats you,

the mother who spanks you,

the soldier who kills for you,

and the social worker who fits your past and future into a folder in a filing cabinet

all ask

“WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITHOUT US?

It would be anarchy.”

And the daughter who runs away from home,

the bus driver on the picket line,

the veteran who threw back his medal but holds on to his rifle,

the boy saved from suicide by the love of his friends,

the maid who must bow to those who can’t even cook for themselves,

the immigrant hiking across a desert to find her family on the other side,

the kid on his way to prison because he burned down a shopping mall they were building over his childhood dreams,

the neighbor who cleans up the syringes from the vacant lot, hoping someone will turn it into a garden,

the hitchhiker on the open road,

the college dropout who gave up on career and health insurance and
sometimes even food so he could write revolutionary poetry for the
world,

maybe all of us can feel it:

our bosses and tormentors are afraid of what they would do without us,

and their threat is a promise —

the best parts of our lives are anarchy already.

Introduction

Anarchy Would Never Work

Anarchism is the boldest of revolutionary social movements to emerge
from the struggle against capitalism — it aims for a world free from all
forms of domination and exploitation. But at its heart is a simple and
convincing proposition: people know how to live their own lives and
organize themselves better than any expert could. Others cynically claim
that people do not know what is in their best interests, that they need
a government to protect them, that the ascension of some political
party could somehow secure the interests of all members of society.
Anarchists counter that decision-making should not be centralized in the
hands of any government, but instead power should be decentralized:
that is to say, each person should be the center of society, and all
should be free to build the networks and associations they need to meet
their needs in common with others.

The education we receive in state-run schools teaches us to doubt our
ability to organize ourselves. This leads many to conclude anarchy is
impractical and utopian: it would never work. On the contrary,
anarchist practice already has a long record, and has often worked quite
well. The official history books tell a selective story, glossing over
the fact that all the components of an anarchist society have existed at
various times, and innumerable stateless societies have thrived for
millennia.

How would an anarchist society compare to statist and capitalist
societies? It is apparent that hierarchical societies work well
according to certain criteria. They tend to be extremely effective at
conquering their neighbors and securing vast fortunes for their rulers.
On the other hand, as climate change, food and water shortages, market
instability, and other global crises intensify, hierarchical models are
not proving to be particularly sustainable. The histories in this book
show that an anarchist society can do much better at enabling all its members to meet their needs and desires.

The many stories, past and present, that demonstrate how anarchy works
have been suppressed and distorted because of the revolutionary
conclusions we might draw from them. We can live in a society with no
bosses, masters, politicians, or bureaucrats; a society with no judges,
no police, and no criminals, no rich or poor; a society free of sexism,
homophobia, and transphobia; a society in which the wounds from
centuries of enslavement, colonialism, and genocide are finally allowed
to heal. The only things stopping us are the prisons, programming, and
paychecks of the powerful, as well as our own lack of faith in
ourselves.

Of course, anarchists do not have to be practical to a fault.
If we ever win the freedom to run our own lives, we’ll probably come up
with entirely new approaches to organization that improve on these tried
and true forms. So let these stories be a starting point, and a
challenge.

What exactly is anarchism?

Volumes have been written in answer to this question, and millions of
people have dedicated their lives to creating, expanding, defining, and
fighting for anarchy. There are countless paths to anarchism and
countless beginnings: workers in 19^th century Europe fighting
against capitalism and believing in themselves instead of the
ideologies of authoritarian political parties; indigenous peoples
fighting colonization and reclaiming their traditional, horizontal
cultures; high school students waking up to the depth of their
alienation and unhappiness; mystics from China one thousand years ago or
from Europe five hundred years ago, Daoists or Anabaptists, fighting
against government and organized religion; women rebelling against the
authoritarianism and sexism of the Left. There is no Central Committee
giving out membership cards, and no standard doctrine. Anarchy means
different things to different people. However, here are some basic
principles most anarchists agree on.

Autonomy and Horizontality: All people
deserve the freedom to define and organize themselves on their own
terms. Decision-making structures should be horizontal rather than
vertical, so no one dominates anyone else; they should foster power to act freely rather than power over others. Anarchism opposes all coercive hierarchies, including capitalism, the state, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

Mutual Aid: People should help one another voluntarily;
bonds of solidarity and generosity form a stronger social glue than the
fear inspired by laws, borders, prisons, and armies. Mutual aid is
neither a form of charity nor of zero-sum exchange; both giver and
receiver are equal and interchangeable. Since neither holds power over
the other, they increase their collective power by creating
opportunities to work together.

Voluntary Association: People should be free to
cooperate with whomever they want, however they see fit; likewise, they
should be free to refuse any relationship or arrangement they do not
judge to be in their interest. Everyone should be able to move freely,
both physically and socially. Anarchists oppose borders of all kinds and
involuntary categorization by citizenship, gender, or race.

Direct Action: It is more empowering and effective to
accomplish goals directly than to rely on authorities or
representatives. Free people do not request the changes they want to see
in the world; they make those changes.

Revolution: Today’s entrenched systems of repression
cannot be reformed away. Those who hold power in a hierarchical system
are the ones who institute reforms, and they generally do so in ways
that preserve or even amplify their power. Systems like capitalism and
white supremacy are forms of warfare waged by elites; anarchist
revolution means fighting to overthrow these elites in order to create a
free society.

Self-Liberation: “The liberation of the workers is the
duty of the workers themselves,” as the old slogan goes. This applies to
other groups as well: people must be at the forefront of their own
liberation. Freedom cannot be given; it must be taken.

A note on inspiration

Pluralism and freedom are not compatible with orthodox ideologies. The
historical examples of anarchy do not have to be explicitly anarchist.
Most of the societies and organizations that have successfully lived
free of government have not called themselves “anarchist”; that term
originated in Europe in the 19^th century, and anarchism as a self-conscious social movement is not nearly as universal as the desire for freedom.

It is presumptuous to assign the label “anarchist” to people who have
not chosen it; instead, we can use a range of other terms to describe
examples of anarchy in practice. “Anarchy” is a social situation free of
government and coercive hierarchies held together by self-organized
horizontal relationships; “anarchists” are people who identify
themselves with the social movement or philosophy of anarchism.
Anti-authoritarians are people who expressly want to live in a society
without coercive hierarchies, but do not, to the best of our knowledge,
identify as anarchists — either because the term was not available to
them or because they do not see the specifically anarchist movement as
relevant to their world. After all, the anarchist movement as such
emerged from Europe and it inherited a worldview in accordance with this
background; meanwhile there are many other struggles against authority
that spring from different worldviews and have no need to call
themselves “anarchist.” A society that exists without a state, but does
not identify itself as anarchist, is “stateless”; if that society is not
stateless by chance, but consciously works to prevent the emergence of
hierarchies and identifies with its egalitarian characteristics, one
might describe it as “anarchistic.”[1]

The examples in this book have been selected from a wide range of times
and places — about ninety altogether. Thirty are explicitly anarchist;
the rest are all stateless, autonomous, or consciously
anti-authoritarian. More than half of the examples are from present-day
Western society, a third are drawn from stateless societies that provide
a view of the breadth of human possibility outside of Western
civilization, and the remaining few are classical historical examples.
Some of these, such as the Spanish Civil War, are cited multiple times
because they are well documented and offer a wealth of information. The
number of examples included makes it impossible to explore each one in
the detail it deserves. Ideally the reader will be inspired to pursue
these questions herself, distilling further practical lessons from the
attempts of those who came before.

It will become apparent throughout this book that anarchy exists in
conflict with the state and capitalism. Many of the examples given here
were ultimately crushed by police or conquering armies, and it is in
large part due to this systematic repression of alternatives that there
have not been more examples of anarchy working. This bloody history
implies that, to be thoroughgoing and successful, an anarchist
revolution would have to be global. Capitalism is a global system,
constantly expanding and colonizing every autonomous society it
encounters. In the long run, no one community or country can remain
anarchist while the rest of the world is capitalist. An anti-capitalist
revolution must destroy capitalism totally, or else be destroyed. This
does not mean that anarchism must be a single global system. Many
different forms of anarchist society could coexist, and these in turn
could coexist with societies that were not anarchist, so long as the
latter were not confrontationally authoritarian or oppressive. The
following pages will show the great diversity of forms anarchy and
autonomy can take.

The examples in this book show anarchy working for a period of time, or
succeeding in a specific way. Until capitalism is abolished, all such
examples will necessarily be partial. These examples are instructive in
their weaknesses as well as their strengths. In addition to providing a
picture of people creating communities and meeting their needs without
bosses, they raise the question of what went wrong and how we could do
better next time.

To this end, here are some recurring themes that may be beneficial to reflect on in the course of reading this book:

Isolation: Many anarchist projects work quite well, but
only make an impact in the lives of a tiny number of people. What
engenders this isolation? What tends to contribute to it, and what can
offset it?

Alliances: In a number of examples, anarchists and
other anti-authoritarians were betrayed by supposed allies who sabotaged
the possibility of liberation in order to gain power for themselves.
Why did anarchists choose these alliances, and what can we learn about
what kind of alliances to make today?

Repression: Autonomous communities and revolutionary
activities have been stopped cold by police repression or military
invasion time after time. People are intimidated, arrested, tortured,
and killed, and the survivors must go into hiding or drop out of the
struggle; communities that had once provided support withdraw in order
to protect themselves. What actions, strategies, and forms of
organization best equip people to survive repression? How can those on
the outside provide effective solidarity?

Collaboration: Some social movements or radical
projects choose to participate in or accommodate themselves to aspects
of the present system in order to overcome isolation, be accessible to a
greater range of people, or avoid repression. What are the advantages
and pitfalls of this approach? Are there ways to overcome isolation or
avoid repression without it?

Temporary gain: Many of the examples in this book no
longer exist. Of course, anarchists are not trying to create permanent
institutions that take on lives of their own; specific organizations
should come to an end when they are no longer helpful. Realizing that,
how can we make the most of bubbles of autonomy while they last, and how
can they continue to inform us after they have ceased to be? How can a
series of temporary spaces and events be linked to create a continuity
of struggle and community?

The tricky topic of representation

In as many cases as was possible, we sought direct feedback from people
with personal experience in the struggles and communities described in
this book. With some examples this was impossible, due to unnavigable
chasms of distance or time. In these cases we had to rely exclusively on
written representations, generally recorded by outside observers. But
representation is not at all a neutral process, and outside observers
project their own values and experiences onto what they are observing.
Of course, representation is an inevitable activity in human discourse,
and moreover outside observers can contribute new and useful
perspectives.

However, our world is not that simple. As European civilization spread
and dominated the rest of the planet, the observers it sent out were
generally the surveyors, missionaries, writers, and scientists of the
ruling order. On a world scale, this civilization is the only one with
the right to interpret itself and all other cultures. Western systems of
thought were forcibly spread around the world. Colonized societies were
cut up and exploited as slave labor, economic resources, and
ideological capital. Non-Western peoples were represented back to the
West in ways that would confirm the Western worldview and sense of
superiority, and justify the ongoing imperial project as necessary for
the good of the peoples being forcibly civilized.

As anarchists trying to abolish the power structure responsible for
colonialism and many other wrongs, we want to approach these other
cultures in good faith, in order to learn from them, but if we’re not
careful we could easily fall into the accustomed eurocentric pattern of
manipulating and exploiting these other cultures for our own ideological
capital. In cases where we could find no one from the community in
question to review and criticize our own interpretations, we have tried
to situate the storyteller in the telling, to subvert his or her
objectivity and invisibility, to deliberately challenge the validity of
our own information, and to propose representations that are flexible
and humble. We don’t know exactly how to accomplish this balancing act,
but our hope is to learn while trying.

Some indigenous people whom we consider comrades in the struggle against
authority feel that white people have no right to represent indigenous
cultures, and this position is especially justified given that for five
hundred years, Euro/American representations of indigenous peoples have
been self-serving, exploitative, and connected to ongoing processes of
genocide and colonization. On the other hand, part of our goal in
publishing this book has been to challenge the historical eurocentrism
of the anarchist movement and encourage ourselves to be open to other
cultures. We could not do this by only presenting stories of
statelessness from our own culture. The author and most of the people
working on this book in an editorial capacity are white, and it is no
surprise that what we write reflects our backgrounds. In fact, the
central question this book seeks to address, whether anarchy could work,
seems itself to be eurocentric. Only a people who have obliterated the
memory of their own stateless past could ask themselves whether they
need the state. We recognize that not everyone shares this historical
blindspot and that what we publish here may not be useful for people
from other backgrounds. But we hope that by telling stories of the
cultures and struggles of other societies, we can help correct the
eurocentrism endemic to some of our communities and become better
allies, and better listeners, whenever people from other cultures choose
to tell us their own stories.

Someone who read over this text pointed out to us that reciprocity is a
fundamental value of indigenous worldviews. The question he posed to us
was, if anarchists who are mostly Euro/American are going to take
lessons from indigenous or other communities, cultures, and nations,
what will we offer in return? I hope that wherever possible, we offer
solidarity — widening the struggle and supporting other peoples who
struggle against authority without calling themselves anarchists. After
all, if we are inspired by certain other societies, shouldn’t we do more
to recognize and aid their ongoing struggles?

Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999) offers an important perspective on some of these themes.

Recommended Reading

1. Human Nature

Anarchism challenges the typical Western conception of human nature by
envisioning societies built on cooperation, mutual aid, and solidarity
between people, rather than competition and survival of the fittest.

Aren’t people naturally selfish?

Everybody has a sense of self-interest, and the capability to act in a
selfish way at other people’s expense. But everyone also has a sense of
the needs of those around them, and we are all capable of generous and
selfless actions. Human survival depends on generosity. The next time
someone tells you a communal, anarchistic society could not work because
people are naturally selfish, tell him he should withhold food from his
children pending payment, do nothing to help his parents have a
dignified retirement, never donate to charities, and never help his
neighbors or be kind to strangers unless he receives compensation. Would
he be able to lead a fulfilling existence, taking the capitalist
philosophy to its logical conclusions? Of course not. Even after
hundreds of years of being suppressed, sharing and generosity remain
vital to human existence. You don’t have to look to radical social
movements to find examples of this. The United States may be, on a
structural level, the most selfish nation in the world — it is the
richest of “developed” countries, but has among the lowest life
expectancies because the political culture would sooner let poor people
die than give them healthcare and welfare. But even in the US it’s easy
to find institutional examples of sharing that form an important part of
the society. Libraries offer an interconnected network of millions of
free books. PTA potlucks and neighborhood barbecues bring people
together to share food and enjoy each other’s company. What examples of
sharing might develop outside the restrictive bounds of state and
capital?

Currency-based economies have only existed a few thousand years, and
capitalism has only been around a few hundred years. The latter has
proven to work quite miserably, leading to the greatest inequalities of
wealth, the largest mass starvations, and the worst distribution systems
in world history — though hats off, it’s produced a lot of wonderful
gadgets. It might surprise people to learn how common other types of
economies have been in earlier times, and how much they differed from
capitalism.

One economy developed over and over by humans on every continent has
been the gift economy. In this system, if people have more than they
need of anything, they give it away. They don’t assign value, they don’t
count debts. Everything you don’t use personally can be given as a gift
to someone else, and by giving more gifts you inspire more generosity
and strengthen the friendships that keep you swimming in gifts too. Many
gift economies lasted for thousands of years, and proved much more
effective at enabling all of the participants to meet their needs.
Capitalism may have drastically increased productivity, but to what end?
On one side of your typical capitalist city someone is starving to
death while on the other side someone is eating caviar.

Western economists and political scientists initially assumed that many
of these gift economies were actually barter economies: proto-capitalist
exchange systems lacking an efficient currency: “I’ll give you one
sheep for twenty loaves of bread.” In general, this is not how these
societies described themselves. Later, anthropologists who went to live
in such societies and were able to shed their cultural biases showed
people in Europe that many of these were indeed gift economies, in which
people intentionally kept no tally of who owed what to whom so as to
foster a society of generosity and sharing.

What these anthropologists may not have known is that gift economies
have never been totally suppressed in the West; in fact they surfaced
frequently within rebellious movements. Anarchists in the US today also
exemplify the desire for relationships based on generosity and the
guarantee that everyone’s needs will be met. In a number of towns and
cities, anarchists hold Really Really Free Markets — essentially, flea
markets without prices. People bring goods they have made or things they
don’t need anymore and give them away for free to passersby or other
participants. Or, they share useful skills with one another. In one free
market in North Carolina, every month:

two hundred or more people from all walks of life gather at the commons
in the center of our town. They bring everything from jewelry to
firewood to give away, and take whatever they want. There are booths
offering bicycle repair, hairstyling, even tarot readings. People leave
with full-size bed frames and old computers; if they don’t have a
vehicle to transport them, volunteer drivers are available. No money
changes hands, no one haggles over the comparative worth of items or
services, nobody is ashamed about being in need. Contrary to government
ordinances, no fee is paid for the use of this public space, nor is
anyone “in charge.” Sometimes a marching band appears; sometimes a
puppetry troupe performs, or people line up to take a swing at a piñata.
Games and conversations take place around the periphery, and everyone
has a plate of warm food and a bag of free groceries. Banners hang from
branches and rafters proclaiming “FOR THE COMMONS, NOT LANDLORDS OR
BUREAUCRACY” and “NI JEFES, NI FRONTERAS” and a king-size blanket is
spread with radical reading material, but these aren’t essential to the
event — this is a social institution, not a demonstration.

Thanks to our monthly ‘Free Markets, everyone in our town has a working
reference point for anarchist economics. Life is a little easier for
those of us with low or no income, and relationships develop in a space
in which social class and financial means are at least temporarily
irrelevant.[2]

The traditional society of the Semai, in Malaya, is based on gift-giving
rather than bartering. We could not find any accounts of their society
recorded by the Semai themselves, but they explained how it worked to
Robert Dentan, a Western anthropologist who lived with them for a time.
Dentan writes that the “system by which the Semai distribute food and
services is one of the most significant ways in which members of a
community are knit together... Semai economic exchanges are more like
Christmas exchanges than like commercial exchanges.”[3]
It was considered “punan,” or taboo, for members of Semai society to
calculate the value of gifts given or received. Other commonly held
rules of etiquette included the duty to share whatever they had that
they did not immediately need, and the duty to share with guests and
anyone who asked. It was punan not to share or to refuse a request, but
also to ask for more than someone could give.

Many other societies have also distributed and exchanged surpluses as
gifts. Aside from the social cohesion and joy that is gained from
sharing with your community without greedily keeping accounts, a gift
economy can also be justified in terms of personal interests. Often, a
person cannot consume what they produce all by themselves. The meat from
a day’s hunt will go bad before you can eat it all. A tool, like a saw,
will lay unused most of the time if it is the property of a single
person. It makes more sense to give away most of the meat or share your
saw with your neighbors, because you are ensuring that in the future
they will give extra food to you and share their tools with you — thus
ensuring that you have access to more food and a wider range of tools,
and you and your neighbors become richer without having to exploit
anybody.

From what we know, however, members of gift economies would probably not
justify their actions with arguments of calculated self-interest, but
with moral reasoning, explaining sharing as the right thing to do. After
all, an economic surplus is the result of a certain way of looking at
the world: it is a social choice and not a material certainty. Societies
must choose, over time, to work more than they need to, to quantify
value, or to only consume the minimum required for their survival and to
surrender all the rest of their produce to a common storehouse
controlled by a class of leaders. Even if a hunting party or a group of
gatherers gets lucky and brings home a huge amount of food, there is no
surplus if they consider it normal to share it with everyone else, glut
themselves with a big feast, or invite a neighboring community to party
until all the food is eaten. It’s certainly more fun that way than
measuring out pounds of food and calculating what percentage we earned.

As for loafers, even if people do not calculate the value of gifts and
keep a balance sheet, they will notice if someone consistently refuses
to share or contribute to the group, violating the customs of the
society and the sense of mutual aid. Gradually, such people will damage
their relationships, and miss out on some of the nicer benefits of
living in a society. It seems that in all known gift economies, even the
laziest of people were never refused food — in stark contrast to
capitalism — but feeding a few loafers is an insignificant drain on a
society’s resources, especially when compared to pampering the voracious
elite of our society. And losing this tiny amount of resources is far
preferable to losing our compassion and letting people starve to death.
In more extreme cases, if members of such a society were more
aggressively parasitic, attempting to monopolize resources or force
other people to work for them — in other words, acting like capitalists —
they could be ostracized and even expelled from the society.

Some stateless societies have chiefs who play ritual roles, often
related to giving gifts and spreading resources. In fact, the term
“chief” can be deceptive because there have been so many different human
societies that have had what the West classifies as “chiefs,” and in
each society the role entailed something a little different. In many
societies chiefs held no coercive power: their responsibility was to
mediate disputes or conduct rituals, and they were expected to be more
generous than anyone else. Ultimately they worked harder and had less
personal wealth than others. One study found that a common reason for
the people to depose or expel a chief was if the chief was not
considered generous enough.[4]