Anarchy is Everywhere

The following piece is the lead editorial in Practical Anarchy #14 (www.practicalanarchy.org), published earlier this year. Sample copies of this issue are still available for $3 and subscriptions are $15 for four issues. Our next issue on healthcare will be out later in September. Bulk copies of this issue are available for local distribution at reasonable rates.

Anarchy is Everywhere

These days it seems like anarchy is everywhere. Of course, we’re not talking about chaos breaking out everywhere, since anarchism has never been about chaos. No, there seem to be more and more signs that anarchy is afoot, above and beyond and below the anarchist movement. We anarchists are used to thinking about anarchism in narrow terms: anarchists are people who call themselves anarchists and belong to something called “the anarchist movement.” If the public knows about the existence of anarchists at all, they thinks of us as black-clad rioters who cause trouble at big protests. While the anarchist movement is still the main place where you can find self-described anarchists, there are more and more people out there who can be described as “anarchists” even if they don’t describe themselves as such. These “natural” anarchists have always been out there, as has been pointed out by a number of anarchist thinkers. Hostility towards government, capitalism, corporations, the police, big institutions, and the corporate media is not just high, but it continues to grow. The human instinct towards freedom, liberty, self-management, cooperation, and egalitarianism is still going strong. Over half of the voting age American population doesn’t vote in elections, not just because they are disaffected by the corrupt American political system, but because they say that the system is just rigged against the “little guy.”

There wasn’t going to be a special theme for this issue of Practical Anarchy, but after assembling the articles for this issue, a theme emerged about the existence of anarchist ideas throughout everyday life. A profile of Ella Baker, a famous civil rights activist in the U.S, is one of our feature articles. The more famous Martin Luther King, Jr, overshadowed her work, but Baker is recognized now as a key figure in the civil rights struggle. Much of Baker’s activism could be described as anarchist--it involved empowering and educating people at the grassroots level without attempting to create leaders to lead people. This issue of Practical Anarchy also features an interview with James Mumm, an activist who went from being an anarcho-punk ten years ago to a full time community organizer today. Prole Cat explains his journey from being a product of Southern confederate culture to becoming a libertarian socialist. Starhawk reports on solidarity work that anarchists are doing in occupied Palestine. And Eric Laursen, one of our editors, writes about his experiences when he unexpectedly found himself running a stock portfolio, raising questions about what anarchists should offer as an alternative to the contemporary American retirement system, which is increasingly built around individual investment accounts. This is just a small sampling of self-identified anarchists and natural anarchists. The latter type describes those people like Ella Baker who probably never use the anarchist label to describe themselves or their work, yet are nonetheless doing things that can be described as being anarchist.

The power of anarchist ideas can be seen when people put them into practice. Anarchists all want to see a social revolution take place, but we understand the importance of putting our ideas into practice in everyday life. We certainly don’t want to be seen as hypocrites, so we practice what we preach, understanding that the ends are tied to the means we implement on the road to an anarchist future. Putting our ideas into practice demonstrates to other people that anarchist ideas are realistic and pragmatic--not some kind of pie-in-the-sky utopianism. Anarchism is demonstrated when we feed people through Food Not Bombs or when people set up groups based on anarchist principles, such as Anti-Racist Action, to organize direct action (in contrast to hierarchical, authoritarian “anti-racist” groups like the cop-loving Southern Poverty Law Center). Anarchism is put into practice when we take direct action in the workplace, or when we take over the airwaves with pirate radio instead of asking the state for permission to broadcast to our community. We see anarchism in action in the free software movement, which promotes the radical idea that software codes should be free of intellectual property controls. There are political reasons why open source software is promoted, used and developed by anarchists. When people cooperate with each other to set up a new Independent Media Center, they are putting anarchism into action, even if the people involved aren’t anarchists! We see anarchism in action in the self-help movement, for example in the decentralized Alcoholic Anonymous network. People may not see these informal arrangements as anarchy, but a neighborhood babysitting co-op or a volunteer vehicle service for the elderly are examples of anarchism put into action. And every time a person says no to the government or says no to some cop, that is anarchy in action.

Anarchists have long argued that freedom is a natural human instinct. Anarchist writers have pointed to the many episodes in human history where average people banded together to overthrow an evil tyrant or king. Kropotkin pointed out that mutual aid and cooperation have played important factors in evolution. So it shouldn’t surprise anybody when anarchy keeps springing up in places where it isn’t supposed to, or where there aren’t anarchists around to play a catalyst in getting social change started. What is surprising about some working class person who gets fed up with corporate radio and decides to set up his or her own radio station? This is one of the purest forms of direct action, often initiated by people who are unfamiliar with anarchist ideas or the anarchist movement. Are these spontaneous acts of civil disobedience and defiance of authority, or are they just part of the human preference for freedom? Not only are these acts instances of anarchism happening in daily life, but they represent only the tip of the iceberg.

There is still a crucial need for anarchists and anarchist movements, but we should be encouraged by the fact that anarchy exists throughout everyday life, despite everything that the state and capitalism does to drive these flowers into the sidewalk cracks. Anarchism is everywhere! We should celebrate that fact and point it out to everybody!

Chuck Munson
April 2004
Leawood, KS

Practical Anarchy Magazine #14
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