This article appears in the new issue of Kick It Over (#36 /Winter 1999) which is Practical Anarchy's Canadian sister publication.
A sample copy of KIO obtained for $3.75 from: KIO, PO Box 1836, Guelph, ON, Canada, N1H 7A1
Letters in issue number 35 from Jonathan Simcock and Larry Gambone, the program for the recent Active Resistance conference in Chicago, as well as a battery of articles in the past few years in magazines such as Kick It Over, Practical Anarchy, Our Generation, and Social Anarchism, point to a trend within anarchist thought and activism which is encouraging. Despite the vague homilies and dogmatic assertions by contemporary anarchists on the question of economic relations, a line of argument is emerging that promises a more useful--if more complex--set of ideas and strategies for transforming communities. Rooted in both historical and anthropological (rather than exclusively polemical) understandings of the world, anarchists are beginning to realize the importance of thinking in terms of heterodox strategies rather than ideal systems.
The most significant weaknesses, in my estimation, of the anarchist critique historically have been in the realm of economics and in strategies for change. Marxists of all stripes have enjoyed a (mostly) dogmatic proscription on these question, and have centered organization efforts around political economic transformation of the workplace in their bid for support and allegiance. Repulsed by the authoritarian mechanisms to which Marxist idealogues have generally appealed for transforming society into a post-capitalist state, anarchists have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We have generally retreated from a focus on political economy and on direct work toward social transformation in favor of less defined social critiques, limply trumpeted from podiums, books, and journals.
This was particularly true for Anglo anarchists in the post-World War Two years, who shifted attention to the psychic nature of human suffering in modern bureacratic and totalitarian regimes. To be sure, Anglo anarchists provided crucial and enlivening additions to the anarchist repetoire, opening up lively debates and inquiries into fileds as diverse as psychology, education, architecture, and town planning. George Woodcock, Paul Goodman, Dwight MacDonald, Colin Ward, Louise Bernari and the school of writers associated with Freedom Press were all prime innovators, carrying forward the anarchist cause into new territory. However, the result of this thrust has been, for some decades, a stagnation on political economic questions and on strategies for social change.
More often than not, when anarchists have returned to such questions, it has usually been through highly polemical, idealized, and utopian routes, rather than strategic paths toward the transformation of communities. Whether advanced in the form of "Abolition of Work" arguments by relatively privileged First World intellectuals who do not *have* to work, or through appeals to return to a mythical, primitive social order from anti-technology camps, we anarchists have succeeded in further isolating ourselves from people in our communities. Even syndicalist ideas, once appealing and meaningful in certain historical contexts--Spain or the Pacific Northwest in the 1920s, for example--had become stale, outmoded relics of a high industrial era by the 1940s and 50s. In truth, anarchists have begun to look like a snotty coterie of middle-class intellegentsia, rather than a political network offering sensible, workable alternatives to the present destructive order.
But the strain of thinking which has gained currency on the pages of Kick It Over, which has emerged from decades of grass roots experimentation with alternative economic arrangements, and which has been most notably advanced in the anarchist press by writers like George Benello, Colin Ward, and Murray Bookchin, has been that which emphasizes dynamic, mixed, community-based, democratic economies. It takes as a starting point the understanding that economic relationships have tended toward heterodoxy in most every human society--even when large-scale, bureacratic and totalitarian states attempt to force such relations into predictable, uniform regimes. Thus, as anarchists, our goal should not be to seek proscriptive formulae (like our Marxists and Libertarian cousins), but rather to work with others in our community to locate the right mix of economic relationships--a mix that includes appropriate technologies, ecologically oriented production systems, varieties of work arrangements, and democratic control of basic resources. Capitalist economies are mixed economies as well, but they do not work to the benifit of most people. The challenge is to find mixes of ownership, control, circulation, and distribution of goods and resources which maximize equity, voluntary participation, creativity, and human capability.
This strain of thinking has five primary advantages. First, it incorporates anarchist values at the core of its thinking. Second, it is more properly based on understandings of history, on a knowledge of past successes and pitfalls of various economic arrangements and orders. Third, it is more properly anthropological, in that it seeks understanding from non-dogmatic research into the bewildering variety of economic relations which encompass diverse communities around the globe--many of which persist despite the encroachment of global capitalism. Fourth, this strain is doggedly pragmatic, finding sustenance in recent and current experiments, organizations, tendencies and trends which can be studied, documented, and applied. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, this line of thinking and acting is translatable--that is, it can be readily understood and appreciated by non-anarchists in our communities.
This last factor is perhaps the most crucial for anarchists today, for we stand at the precipice of the dustbin of history. While magazines, infoshops, conferences, and projects devoted exclusively to anarchism and appealing nearly exclusively to anarchists can provide useful arenas of consultation and exchange, we are in great need of more anarchists willing to engage in community-based organizing. And by this I do not mean "taking anarchism to the masses." Rather, I mean immersing ourselves in diverse organizations and groups in our communities that have as an end the mobilization of people in the public sphere, and sharing our time, energy, expertise, and vision with our non-anarchist friends, neighbors, and co-workers.
An article by Tom Knocke in issue 21 of Social Anarchism, reproduced widely in pamphlet form, ably discusses the importance of anarchist involvement in community organizing. Pointing to the successes (and shortcomings) of non-anarchist organizing institutions such as the Midwest Academy, Knocke proposes that anarchists become involved in issues in the communities where they live, in struggles that people in these communities feel are important, rather than imposing notions of what is and is not important onto other groups. According to Knocke (and in my own experience), working within this bottom-up strategy, building power within a community to tackle relevant issues, making connections and forging coalitions with non-anarchists in our neighborhoods will bring anarchists closer to our ideal of "grass roots" social transformation.
This is not to say that anarchists MUST adopt this strategy of joining non-anarchist organizations, engaging in coalition work, hitting the streets, knocking on doors, joining with neighbors and mobilizing around issues deemed important at the grass roots. If we anarchists value anything about our politics it should be diversity and heterodoxy, and the enjoyment of a wide variety of approaches to transforming society. My argument is merely that we must recognize the importance of these heterodox approaches, and that we should make community-based organizing or labor agitating as much a priority as establishing infoshops and web sites.
Experimentation with and agitation for economic democracy and community control of basic resources links anarchists into broader networks of activism. It brings us increasingly into contact with people and groups with whom presently we have had little contact--especially grass roots, community-based organizations. We are used to bumping elbows at the demo or march with the Hard and Soft Left. But how many anarchists have done much work with people right in their own neighborhoods and towns? People who may or may not define themselves politically, but who are generally just as frustrated and disgusted with the current order of things as we are. In the second half of the twentieth century, neither anarchists nor the Left in general have been successful in reaching such people. Instead, both political networks have wallowed in self-aggrandizing irrelevance, while the managers of our political economic order laugh their way to the bank or to their public office.
Anarchists have much to learn from grass roots groups and community based organizations--probably more than they have to learn from us--particularly in the realm of community relations and real-world relevance. Community-based organizations are at the forefront of appropriate neighborhood and regional development, and often reflect the impulses and perspectives of their constituent communities. At the same time, anarchists have much to say about group dynamics, authoritarianism in social and political relationships, and nurture a healthy mistrust of the state. Thus, we can offer pointed critiques of state-dependent or directed solutions to social problems in our communities, and present alternatives in various forms of egalitarian, direct-action organizing. Lastly, as much as we might struggle against our peculiar typecasts in Progressive and Left circles, few political traditions have such a creative heritage of protests, publications, and theater as we do.
This exchange of perspectives and ideas can be fertile ground for a new wave of activism, and significantly enrich the anarchist repetoire. For example, syndicalist ideas have been rejuvenated--indeed transformed--through an intermingling with social ecology and community environmental movements. Anarcho-punks who established "spaces" in the late 1980s and 1990s have discovered how isolating the anarcho-punk subculture can be, and have taken steps to broaden their involvement in community affairs. And the cross-pollenation of crusty old anarchos like Benello and Ward with contemporary squatter campaigns, alternative economics projects, and grass roots organizations dramatically improved their earlier, polemical prose toward acute, analytical, and pragmatic assessments of strategies and courses for social change. (See Benello's From the Ground Up and Ward's Anarchy in Action for top-notch examples.)
Our isolation from more broad and integrated grass roots activism has severely delimited our pool of ideas, and contributed to a certain staleness within the anarchist networks. But stale, inbred polemics are simply no longer useful if we really want to reach people. This in no way means we should abandon our principles; in fact, without a core of values that militate for equality, mutual aid, voluntary organization, and against the exercise of arbitrary authority, we would cease to be anarchists. Rather, I suggest that we re-assess our notions and strategies of social change (how to get from A to Z), and reevaluate our role within larger trends in the struggle to transform communities. In other words, its well and good to have Z in mind when we start from A, but can we simply leap from one point to the other, or do we need to devise ways to get there that are relevant, workable, and which carry our values forward? Good values, lofty ideals, even precise goals have little relevance if there is no strategic framework, no cogent set of approaches, to realize them.
In the end, anarchists will only be able to contribute to social transformation if we drop the pretenses, and begin to view anarchism not as a fixed order to achieve (a "workless" society, a pleistocene utopia) but rather as a set of tools and strategies for analyzing social conditions, identifying illegitimate forms of authority, and devising broad, participatory strategies for change. With this approach, one which is already gaining ground in anarchist networks, I am confident that we can wrench ourselves from insignificance and contribute to (and learn from) the larger social movements which surround us.
Another factor in our isolation as anarchists from our communities has been our tendency to reject or distance ourselves from our own pasts and backgrounds. We have become repulsed by what we find abhorent in our families and cultures, but have once more thrown out baby and bathwater wholesale, and have failed to come to grips with our histories. As a result, the anarchist "scene"--and to a large degree the Left in general--is populated by people without pasts.
This tendency has not always been as prevalent, and may reflect broader changes in identity politics over the past 20 or 30 years. For example, in the 1920s and 30s there was a strong and creative admixture of radical politics and cultural Zionism within Jewish anarchist networks. Membership in the CNT in Spain in 1936 did not erase the strong family, ethnic, and regional ties felt among people. The culture of the IWW was cohesive and continuous with white ethnic and folk cultures--particularly emanating from the Appalachian, Tidewater, and Piedmont South. Even today, many anarchists do not neccessarily repudiate their own pasts, but rather subordinate them excessively in their adoption of more exclusively political identities.
This is not an appeal for ethnic chauvanism, but rather for an honest and measured consideration of the diversity among anarchists, and for a reclamation of a fuller identity politic. For in rejecting our histories, we force ourselves into incestuous enclaves from where we have only the anarchist/radical past to mine for useable histories. But while I admire Emma Goldman or Voltarine de Cleyre, I do not feel any more connected to them than to people from my own cultural background--i.e., Catholic working class and Appalachian poor. There are aspects of both histories that elate and disgust me, and it makes for a richer, more grounded identity to recognize what is good and bad in both. The wholesale adoption of anarchism as a core of identity--as with any politically exclusive identity--forces adherents into relative isolation. It ensconces us within discrete and closed networks which become more incestuous with time, and which delimit the range and diversity of experience. For once circulating in the sub-society, we are each and often compelled to forgoe our pasts, to adopt a pattern of guilt, shame, and revulsion over our heritage. In the end, most anarchists in the subsociety merge into an identity politic which revolves around a false dichotomy: Whitey background vs. anarchist present.
This dichotomy fails on many counts as a healthy source of identity politic. First, it fails to recognize "White" as a construct, and instead assumes it as a legitimate historical category. In fact, there is great diversity amongst White people--and by extention White anarchists. Some hail from industrial river towns and working class families, while others grow up in large cities nurtured (or not) by an Eastern European heritage. Many hail from suburban America yet with diverse and varied backgrounds. Preachers, shysters, con artists, horse thieves, civil servants, farmers, carpenters, doctors, bakers, truck drivers, insurance sellers, sherrifs and cattle rustlers, sufferagists and abolitionists, racists, Whigs, Tories, Klansmen, settlers, immigrants, soldiers, sailors, indentured servants, soda jerks, quilters, tanners, stevedores, coopers, maids, factory workers, paperhangers: this is a small slice of the muddy history of Europeans on this frenzied continent. A small portion of them probably owned slaves, directed the slaughter of Native Americans, or waged men and women in grim squalid factories. A larger portion probably assisted them in these pursuits. A still larger portion tolerated this activity. And the largest portion of all were wage-slaves themselves, or migrant laborors, immigrant sweat shop workers, industrial rank and file, indentured servants, thieves, criminals, rogues, prostitutes, and cannon fodder in the Wars of the American Empire.
Race, class, and gender in our heritage, in our history as people of America, have intermingled and interpenetrated in dazzling, complex, destructive, and empowering ways. Figuring these ways out constitutes a major preoccupation of the discipline of history--but it can also be something each of us seeks to understand about our own past. Not just our own individual heritages--that may be difficult or impossible for most--but the rich and varied pasts of our communities, our peoples.
As much as folks despise Tad Kepley, one of things that I admire about him is that he has never denied his past to the anarchist networks or to himself--that of a kid from a poor, hardscrabble Kansas farming background. As for myself, I have come to realize--despite my rejection of the content of the Catholic religion, that certain crucial forms of my experience within its cultural fold press upon my identity even today: a joy in extended family ties, a love of ritual, a yearn for close-knit community, a sense of lateral solidarity rather than an ideology of individualism, a sympathy for the problems, struggles, and dignity of industrial workers like my father and grandfather.
At the same time I have to reject the patriarchal authoritarianism and the subtle and not-so-subtle racism of the Euro-American working class. But much more of who I am now as a person emerges from my immersion for nearly three decades in that world, one decade of which has been concurrent with my participation in socialist, then anarchist and grass roots politics. Over time I have learned to reconcile my disparate identities, so that my own upbringing ang experience can float against the rigidity which subsocieties like anarchism often demand. My identity, then, like everyone's, is conditional and contextual, not fixed and immotive. and is rooted in the dynamic structures of history and experience.
This reconciliation and recognition allows me a ground on which to live and work that might be difficult to locate otherwise. For when we scrap our histories we scrap much of what makes us unique in a political community. We then seek an exclusive community of common political (or, say, musical) identity, wherein geographic proximity we can disolve our histories and adopt anew. As punk and anarchist subsocieties are not well-known for their ability to pay high rents, we then end up living and working in enclaves within neighborhoods where we are regarded rightfully with suspicion and mistrust. The solution is not, of course, for all anarchists to return to the communities from which we came--many couldn't even afford the housing there! And many literally escaped their nuclear families to begin with, fleeing abuse and torment, perhaps incest and rape to locate a new family, a new ground, a new community. Often these people make the most die-hard members of a subsociety--and more power to them.
However, when we are working for the transformation of society, there is danger in predominatly political sources of identity. Our histories and heritage are important factors; they are relevant to the experience and process of struggle, as it is the very communities from which we come that we seek to transform--too often at a distance measured by our radical disjuncture from our pasts. Moreover, like it or not, our heritage and upbringing subtly and not-so-subtly inform the ways in which we engage the world around us. A purely political-polemical identity neglects this crucial factor, as well as the historical reality that popular social movements are comprised of people from diverese ethnic, religious, and familial backgrounds as well as of varying political persuations.
While the hippies of the 1960s and early 70s made a considerable impact on the North American and European landscape, primarily in terms of breaking certain constraints on individuality and widening the repetoire of choices for living lives, their tendency to settle into "drop out" enclaves paved the way for their irrelevance vis-a-vis the larger society. Their tendencies to reject the present and to select uncritically from an idyllic past in order to usher in an "Age of Aquarius," where like-minded people could gather into isolated communes, neglected so many of the crucial differences and diversities--and ultimately the negative social baggage--that they carried with them onto the communal lands. Failure to highlight and confront these differences constitutes a principal failing of their experiments in "alternative living." This strategy, while perhaps fulfilling for some in the short or mid-term, has not been particularly transformative in regards the broader communities the hippies left behind. Many today view their choices, while understandable, as hopelessly groundless, disengaged, and ahistorical.
I don't want this to happen to anarchists. Along with heterodoxy in our approach to solving problems of unjust economic relationships, along with a turn toward community-based activism, we must adopt an appreciation for the heterogeneity within the society of anarchists. For we all carry within us many of the morals, ethics, habits, prejudices, and lessons of our families and cultures. It remains for us to sort these out, to recognize both the good and bad aspects, and to integrate these into our identities accordingly. What is it about a grandfather that drove a truck for 42 years, who was an early union agitator, that informs who you are today? What is it about a strong-willed grandmother who bore 9 children while managing the affairs of a farm that you wish to commemorate in your identity today? What is it about a set of great-grandparents that fled Croatia in the 1920s that makes you different from me?
In coming to terms with, reconciling, and perhaps even gaining a measure of sympathy for our own histories, for our own people, we will better equip and ground ourselves for working in our communities. With this grounding and appreciation, built upon a critical and sympathetic gaze into our pasts and into who we are, we can begin to foster more useful avenues of work and struggle. We will be better able to integrate ourselves into our adopted communities, as we gain sympathies for the compexity of peoples' pasts from our own experience. Finally, we can cease using the anarchist networks as surrogate cultures and press them into the service of social transformation in more relevant ways. Rather than a place to retreat and hide, we can use these networks to spread information about what is working and not working in our own communities, in our own neighborhoods. Eventually, we can use the relative freedom of an anarchist space to reflect on what is good and bad, useful and irrelevant, joyous and painful about our pasts. Finally, we will each be able to view our past not as a gory stigma or a weighty albatross, but rather as a resource for facing the world. We can cease to to be the people without history.
Perhaps the thorniest issue that flows from questions of heterodoxy and identity revolve around relations between urban (big-city) anarchists--who are overwhelmingly of European descent--and their primarily African and Hispanic neighbors. Even if your family history is one of industrial wage-slavery, even if you grew up relatively poor, even if your ancestors had nothing to do with slavery, there is no escaping the power of racial constructs and relationships in North America. Within the construct you are not Native American, you are not African American, you are not Hispanic American. You are a European American.
While I have no magic solutions for this, as I personally live in a community of largely poor Euro-Americans, I would argue that these tensions are only exacerbated when anarchists lose, reject, or repudiate their own histories wholesale. The recognition of the dignity of others is conditional on the assumption of dignity within ourselves. Thus, in learning about and respecting the great diversity of experiences of people from other ethnicities, we can not forget that we ourselves also have ethnicities, histories, and heritage. The adoption of wholly new subcultures, while perhaps liberating for those involved, is often perceived as artificial, snotty, and stand-offish by communities of color. The priority on political mobilization against gentrification in these communities is an intelligent one.
Yet big-city anarchists must search in themselves for the reasons and priorities that found them migrating to those neighborhoods in the first place. As one African American comrade once asked me: "Why don't you all move into trailer parks and small towns where mostly White folk live? Then you could REALLY do some good for Black folk, because in working with White folk in their neighborhoods for their own social justice, and against racism and scapegoating, you make things a lot easier for African American activists."
A very good question, indeed!