But is that the case? What are these Anarchist ideas, if not something which you put in practice or you don't? Seems to me that the methodology itself is the idea where anarchism is concerned!
Marshall McCluhan (media honcho) said something about the media, namely that "the medium is the message" -- the quote means to me that the medium itself speaks to us, above and beyond whatever else it says. To me, it means that the methodology itself is the message we seek to convey.
There are simply no free-standing Anarchist ideas -- somehow untouchable and remote from everyday reality! What is anarchism about, anyway?
It's resistance to illegitimate authority. The permutations of this simple premise flow from it in an adaptive way that deals with illegitimate authority wherever it appears, in a way that no one can predict in a given period of time.
This is why anarchists reject manifestos -- because they are the products of a single person's experience, born in a particular period of time. It's also why we reject government, for much the same reasons -- life is about growing and evolving, rather than achieving some stasis.
There simply is no stasis for the living, which is again why anarchists reject government -- it is a living anachronism, unable and unwilling to grow and evolve as the situations which created it change, to say nothing of the people themselves! Are the Americans today the same as the colonial Americans? Are our worlds even remotely similar? No.
Stasis is impossible, which is why anarchist method, versus antiseptic ideology is more important -- all of the major works of anarchism are many decades old (and older). They are anachronisms.
An anarchist organization can take many forms, but there are common aspects to it -- similar methodology, in other words. Any organization which doesn't practice anarchistic methods -- free association, bottom-up, mass organizing, decentralized and situational power, absence of any hierarchies -- isn't an anarchist organization at all, regardless of what it calls itself.
What matters is the methodology, because that ends up being verifiable to the outsider. Authoritarian organizations depend on conformity, hierarchy, and obedience -- typically to some Great Leader in some form or another. Individual initiative is squelched among the rank-and-file in favor of actions from above, from the leadership, who decide what happens.
The method, then, carries with it revolutionary properties -- so long as the practice of anarchism, rather than the theory or rhetoric of it, is predominant, you are more likely to sustain anarchism.
Anything else leads to "mission creep" -- it's happened with the noblest of ideas. Say, Christianity, for example -- there you went from "love one another" to the Crusades and the Inquisition and Dominion Theology -- in other words, the organization/institution that arose under the Christian banner ceased to resemble the original ideas that created it in the first place.
Rather than pretending this can't happen to anarchists, it's more important to get it right the first time, and keep the method alive indefinitely, rather than focusing on ideological purity or organizational prowess to keep things together. In a society where the rank-and-file are active in defending their liberties, authority will be hard-pressed to intervene.
Ideas alone are simply not enough, no matter how good. What we need, instead, is a personal effort by individuals to uphold the methodology of libertarianism itself, in tangible, rather than abstract, ways.
Working people are instinctive libertarians -- we don't like people telling us what to do; this is the basis for anarchism, at root, and the role of anarchists is in letting people know the ways in which they can resist illegitimate authority, rather than Anarchists providing some nebulous "leadership of ideas" for the rest of us.
Dave Neal
11/13/97