Anarchy in the Here and Now! by Joe Average There is an old saying that if you put 3 anarchists in a room together you will have 4 definitions of anarchy! In fact, every anarchist has her own way of explaining what anarchy is all about. At the same time, anarchists share some very basic assumptions about the ways in which the world works and what kind of life would be better. This pamphlet presents one personUs view--my own-- of anarchy, one that shares certain ideas with all other anarchists and also highlights a variety of personal opinions about the nature of society and the process of social change. Of course, you need not take my word for it, and you need not adopt my view as your own. One of the most important messages of anarchy is RThink For Yourself!S Read! Talk! Find out about anarchist history and see what anarchists are saying and doing today. I have included a list of resources at the end of this essay which covers a variety of publications: books, magazines, journals, pamphlets, and so on. Each presents a particular view or take on anarchy and social transformation; some I agree with, some I do not. It is up to you to determine their differences and similarities, to find out what unites anarchists and what differences we have in our ideas, goals, and strategies. What is anarchy and why should I care? Governments and corporations are out of control, and we no longer feel connected enough to one another to oppose them. Many people do not even want to oppose these powerful elites, as they benefit in certain ways from supporting their programs. But the vast majority of us do not benefit, or the costs drastically outweigh any rewards. We find ourselves isolated, alienated, disconnected. We have problems with the system, but we can not articulate them, nor can we even begin by ourselves to fathom what Rthe systemS entails. It is so vast. We know it has failed miserably in its promise of RhappinessS and Rdomestic tranquility,S that it just doesnUt work, but we arenUt sure what we should replace it with. Many if not most of us hate work and school. We yearn for something different but we donUt know what. We harbor vague notions of finding a job that doesnUt drain us or that we might even like, or of Rjust plugging awayS through school for that diploma or degree. Many of us wish we had more to eat, and we have to rely on the government to feed us, but we feel like shit because of it. Still more people hardly eat at all. They die of starvation and malnutrition, slowly, subtly, but definitely. This is not from lack of food in the world: we watch on the television as they burn tons and tons of grain to keep market prices up. We see a culture so rich in food and resources that it can afford to waste vast amounts every day. Food goes into the landfill instead of our bellies, and grain is grown to feed cattle rather than humans. Millions of people donUt have a roof over their head, even though we know that there are enough buildings to house everyone. We know. And we all know that a small group of people control the vast majorityJof wealth and resources in our society, to the detriment of us all. Deep down, we have some idea that this system creates our hunger and our malnutrition, our homelessness and poverty, our anxiety and despair, our isolation from one another. We are aware in our daily life that we spectate more than we participate. We spend hours and hours watching television when our grandparents would have spent the time talking with neighbors on the stoop or raising a barn down the road. Of course, just because we watch television doesnUt mean we donUt think, but it does isolate us from one another and prevents us from making meaningful associations and actively participating in public life. And where people once came together for speeches and picnics and rallies so that they could discuss the political affairs of their communities, we are now subjected to the glaring spectacle of electronic elections where the choice between Democrat and Republican grows more and more meaningless. In fact, daily we become more and more aware of the real lack of choices in our lives. Of course we do make choices, but from what range of options, and what kind of choices are we allowed to make? Our employers might poll us on our opinion about a new sculpture in the company plaza or about how to make production more efficient, but they will not ask us how we feel our jobs and work life can be improved, or if we feel we make enough money to live on. That is not their concern. Bosses want obedient workers, not active participants. The same is true of officials in government, who are so contemptuous and distrusting of the people that they present only the barest illusion of choice in the conduct of state affairs. Congress squandors resources while raising its pay, presidents and advisors conduct secret wars and arms deals with our tax dollars, and policy makers work hand-in-hand with public relations specialists to control the terms of debate and to limit public input in decisions. Mainstream corporate media, interested purely in profit, actively self-censors news and information to conform to a narrow range of options. A commentator might say Rhomelessness is badS but would NEVER say Rthe system itself is bad because it puts property and profit before human needs.S Thus, our range of options is severely limited by elites in government, big business, and corporate media because they are frightful of the prospect of real public input. Instead of participating, we spectate while the RexpertsS make choices for us. In fact, we are never asked to participate in any meaningful way in the decisions that truly shape and affect our lives. Thus, if you take as a starting premise that true democracy is a condition in which people in a community gather together to participate in the decision-making process, then one way to view anarchy is as the logical conclusion of democratic life. It is to say that you and I, working together, can shape the affairs of our communities far more effectively than can remote politicians and bureaucrats, and that their authority-- backed by force and coercion- -is an arbitrary authority unworthy of our support. Instead, in a true democracy, we would replace authority with merit, coercion with cooperation, and force with voluntary participation. From this we can conclude that democracy as it is practiced today is not true democracy, but is rather a great big joke. It is a system where a small number of people wield the power to shape public life and opinion, to make laws and extract obedience from the majority of the population either by direct force or by more subtle means such as propaganda and misinformation. We do not participate in this system in any meaningful way: once in awhile we are RallowedS to RvoteS in the shams called elections, and we vote for people who tell us that they represent our best interests. In the end, though, nobody can truly represent our interests on such a grand scale, and we do not have the power to enter the political sphere so as to have a say in how our taxes are spent or how our government behaves. Most of us would like to see our tax dollars--if they are to be collected at all- -going toward social spending rather than military spending, but our leaders tell us that we RneedS to build weapons of destruction. They tell us that it is more important to spend money on tracking down, prosecuting, and incarcerating non-violent drug users than it is to educate our children or feed hungry people. When we do attempt to enter the political arena in a meaningful way, such as in large-scale protests over the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf Slaughter, or in citizen-based initiatives to freeze the nuclear build-up or to curb the deadly policies toward Latin America, our leaders ignore us or attack us. This proves that we are not meant to actively participate in political life, and that we are supposed to be obedient and acquiescent and let the RexpertsS handle all the decisions. The same is true in the workplace, where we are even more brutalized and alienated. The difference there is that bosses never even had a pretense of democracy and participation. You shut up and do what you are told or you are fired! Period! Bosses exploit our labor and return small crumbs to us. Corporations destroy the environment to produce commodities for our consumption, and advertisers make us think we need all the crap that they produce. In the end, they make off stinking rich and we work our lives into an early grave for shit. The poorer we are the less chance we have in getting our fair share of the wealth that we deserve, and the less power we have to oppose bosses and the ways in which they use us as factory fodder. The poorer we are the less chance we have in opposing corporations and their constant dumping of toxic wastes in our communities. They have the economic power to do as they please, with few constraints by the government. Together, the government and big business form a powerful organization that clearly acts contrary to the interests of the vast majority of people. We work in their offices and factories and then, when they find an enemy overseas, we die in their wars, or we watch as they send our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters and lovers to die. For what thanks?-- A pitiful wage and a cheap concrete memorial on the courthouse lawn. THANKS BUT NO THANKS! As an anarchist, I oppose the power of all bosses, whether they rule in the state or in the workplace. In fact, as an anarchist I oppose ALL forms of coercion, oppression, domination, and hierarchy. This includes not just one individual dominating another, but also SYSTEMS of oppression such as capitalism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. At root, I practice the principle that an individual should have the freedom to do what she wants so long as it does not harm another individual, and that one should never be brutalized for oneUs skin color or sexuality or gender or way of dressing and eating and living. Anarchy is about creating an environment wherein the individual can develop her creative potential and exercise her liberty to the greatest extent possible in the absence of coercion, laws, regulations, and arbitrary authority. Does this mean, then, that I am opposed to all forms of organization and order? Of course not. Anarchy does not mean Rwithout orderS or Rwithout organization.S It is not chaos. To myJmind, what we have today is chaos, with governments brutalizing and terrorizing populations, making war on us, regulating us, constraining us, strafing villages and cities with bombs, napalm, agent orange, poison gas the world round--ALL governments have at one time or another been guilty of such atrocities. Some, of course, are worse than others in the amount of suffering and destruction they cause. Formerly RCommunistS Soviet Union and presently RCapitalistS United States are both guilty of a long list of dirty deeds, including invasions, covert actions and intervention in other countries, brutalization of domestic populations both at home and abroad. But they are not without rivals: the governments of Indonesia, China, Iraq, United Kingdom, Spain, Iran, Turkey, El Salvador, Romania, Guatemala, Germany, and countless others have been guilty at one time or another of great crimes against humanity. This to me is not order: it is chaos. Chaos is the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund using economic coercion and the threat of violence to force people in so- called RdevelopingS nations to give up subsistence farming and vast tracts of land to Multinational Corporations who then engage in export agribusiness, using the formerly self-sufficient peoples as wage-slaves in their fields. These economic agencies--like the governments and corporations who lend them authority and, when necessary, military force--need obey no moral codes. They are bound by no standards of ethics and sensibility, save their own, and they call what they do the protection of RinterestsS and the maintenance of Rorder.S Of course, it is obvious that it is not our interests they are protecting, but those of rich bosses and corporations. To me, their RorderS is deadly. It is not the kind of world in whichJI want to live! Anarchy opposes this RorderS not with chaos, but with a DIFFERENT KIND OF ORDER! It is a better order, a way of setting up a society in the most reasonable and non-coercive way possible. The challenge for me as an anarchist is to find the best KIND of social organization, one in which the individual can grow and develop to her greatest potential, uninhibited by lack of food or shelter or a fair share of the resources required to live. To me, anarchy is the attempt to create this kind of society, one without leaders and without coercive authority, without wars and without deprivation. How Anarchy? How do we go about building this kind of world? Some people feel that it must be done by gaining control of the state machinery, either through the so-called RdemocraticS process--as with Labor and Socialist and Libertarian parties--or by Revolution. Many Revolutionaries--such as Communists and Marxists--foresee a period where a small RvanguardS of radical intellectuals would act Rin behalf ofS the Rworking classS in order to seize control of the distribution and allocation of resources. Communists believe that in order to create a just society, RrepresentativesS of the working class must act in their interests by seizing state power and instituting a dictatorship. As an anarchist, I feel that these methods are flawed and doomed. Acting within the system through lobbying and voting and politicking CAN be a good tactic for increasing the responsiveness of institutions to the needs of greater numbers of people, but in the end nothing really changes. It is the system itself which is so flawed as to make any small gains within seem incremental at best. Acting through RRevolutionS in the classical sense of the word is even more useless to my thinking, as you just replace one set of bosses with the other. These new bosses claim to represent the interests of the Rworking classS but, as we have seen in the Soviet Union, large-scale Revolutions degenerate into static bureaucracies at best, and totalitarian dungeons at worst. The main problem with this brand of Revolution is that it tries to force changes from the top down onto a society that is not ready for the shock of transformation. The changes are dictated from above, from a national- level state machinery, rather than emerging from the needs of people in their communities. Moreover, Marxist-style Revolutions focus only on economic aspects and ignore the ways in which power is exercised in society, whether it be the Communist bureaucrat dictating the life of the farmer and factory worker, men oppressing women, or one ethnic group dominating another. Finally, talk of Revolution today is not so much arrogant as it is irrelevant: increasingly the professional Revolutionaries are out of touch with basic needs and desires felt by people in daily life, and their sloganeering is elitist and boring. They are more interested in recruiting members, garnering dues, and hocking their papers than they are in working with people in a community to affect real changes. To be fair, much anarchist thought and action in the past and present is equally useless. Many anarchists used to feel that it was enough to just rise up and destroy the state, afterwards instituting RspontaneousS social organizations to co-ordinate work life and civic life. To me, this is an absurd idea for todayUs political and social situation. To begin with, the state is too powerful at this time for people to overthrow directly and militantly. This is by no means to say that militant confrontation with authorities is to be ruled out: in fact, it is crucial that we DO confront authorities when the need arises so that they are always aware that we are here and that we oppose their brutality and oppression. But to imagine that we could topple all the powerful institutions such as the police and army, the FBI and the CIA, schools and the IRS with militant street fighting alone is an exercise in futility. Rather, I believe we should couple our work in confrontation--from within the system and from without--with a broad-based attempt to create alternative social relations and economic networks which help us to minimize our reliance on the state and on corporations, and which emphasize reliance upon ourselves and those in our communities. We need to constantly work to decentralize power, to create institutions which are responsive to our needs and that are inclusive of a diversity of peoples and opinions, and to build organizations from the ground up--the Rgrass rootsS--which do the work of social maintenance without the coercion of government and corporate power. Call it what you will: community control, workplace democracy, DIY (Do-It-Yourself) cultural innovation--the bottom line is voluntary participation and direct access for all individuals in shaping the processes of society. This kind of social transformation could cover a lot of ground, encompassing areas such as but not limited to: Food: localized agricultural support networks which connect rural and urban people into networks of exchange so that a community can strive for self-sufficiency: re-greening of cities and towns using available spaces as commons for growing food: learning how to grow food and teaching others: networks of community kitchens where neighbors and friends can come together to share food and cooking tasks and skills Housing: co-operative housing arrangements both within a house and between neighbors who could share such tasks as gardening, child care, maintenance, and so on: squatting and squatter support for housing the homeless! Economics: starting locally-based co-operative and anti-profit businesses, encouraging barter and exchange networks, realizing the power of your own community to produce a variety of necessities as well as desired luxuries: shift from reliance on a capitalist system to an economy where people share all wealth and resources equitably: taking away the profit motive and doing business in order to support yourself and your partners so as to do away with the need to expand into industrial modes: educate yourself and others about how the consumer choices they make affect people in other parts of the world, and encourage people to alter their habits accordingly... Work: many of us believe that we spend way too much time working for others. Shifting economic emphases would help us become less and less dependent upon the shit wages they pay us, and allow us to work less. In fact, we should be able to produce as much as we need if everyone pitched in just a few hours a day...it requires commitment and participation, but the results are worth the effort! Anything we can do in our communities to ease our dependence upon Rthe manS and his wages is worthwhile. At the same time, explore ways in which your industry or workplace might become more responsive to workersU needs, and better yet how might you band together to gain ownership of the company! Ecology: drastically decreasing consumption of packaged corporate goods is a lot easier than it seems. It is fine and well to attack corporations for their pollution and waste and exploitation, but in the end capitalism demands that consumer market needs be met, and if we can reduce our market needs in a sustained way, we can truly cripple the rich bosses who profit from our consumption and labor! This includes growing your food or buying it from local sources and in bulk, brewing your own beer and rolling your own cigarettes and encouraging others to do the same, cutting out certain luxuries you can do without...living by example can be very powerful! In order to drastically reduce water use and to free up land for re-greening, help promote widespread practice of vegetarianism (see resource guide in the back of this pamphlet!) School: organized revolt in school is well nigh impossible. The system is too powerful. But learning is a value in itself and furthermore can be very beneficial. If you want to do certain things within the system, stay in school and see what you can do in the meantime to spread awareness about how fucked up schools are, and how you and your classmates might make some changes. If you can not stomach one more day of school past the age of 16 but you love learning, drop out and spend your life with books from the library (the public library is a very good institution, and would hopefully exist in ANY society--especially an anarchist society!) Find others who are drop outs and start study groups where you read things together and discuss them. Organize alternative schools, home-school co- operatives, and so on. DonUt let them indoctrinate you: schools are the place where that happens most dramatically! Avoid it! Help others to do the same! Family: re-define family to include a multitude of possibilities, such as gay and lesbian parents, multiple parenting and collective child- rearing, friendship networks and extended kin ties and so on. Share responsibilities fairly and equally and make decisions democratically with as much participation as possible. Adopt children who need homes, raise children without gender or racial or sexual stereotypes. Culture: find ways to integrate work and pleasure, aesthetics and pragmatics. Start DIY spaces, hostleries for nomads, artist co-ops, public art movements with murals and junk sculpture and mass public participation (everyone is creative--help others realize their own creativity)...Provide people on the streets with colored chalk, disrupt daily life, graduate to spray paint and stencils, brushes and paints, transform your environment and make it fun and beautiful! None of this takes the place of working actively to limit the excesses of our government and its penchant for wars and subversion and oppression of people in other countries and at home. Starting a food co-op will not compel the state to pull its resources out of the military system and its weapons and influence out of other nations. We need sustained and protracted activism to challenge state and economic power at all levels, from the courtrooms and congressional chambers to the streets and barricades. But a housing co-op multiplied thousands of times WILL make a huge difference: it will alter and shape the ways in which we engage in social relations, and it will increase our participation in the decisions that effect our lives. In the same vein, civic groups and citizens councils that attempt to take over tasks previously delegated by local governments will herald a truly democratic public life and a system within which individuals feel they can act and be heard. DIY music clubs and magazines and pirate radio stations can form a loose network of alternative media which present a range of opinions and options not found or even possible in mainstream corporate media. Moves for workplace democracy and ownership, or the founding of alternative anti-profit businesses and co-operatives will go a long way toward a society based on sharing and cooperation and freedom rather than on greed and competition and deprivation. We may never fully rid ourselves of deprivation, or of conflict and violence, but we can certainly work toward social organizations which minimize the conditions in which these arise. By working to reduce, minimize, or eliminate coercion, competition, exploitation, and oppression, we lay the groundwork for a different kind of social world. At the same time, then, we must also encourage co-operation, sharing, mutual aid and support, and respect so as to create a community and a public life in which individuals feel connected to one another rather than isolated, and where we each feel free to do as we please so long as it does not oppress or coerce another. We need to foster both personal and social relationships that respect and tolerate difference, wherein a variety of groups and individuals can come together as they see fit for the creation of community and the equitable sharing of resources. Groups can form and function as they need, or live separately as they desire. The important thing is that no one group or individual should hold coercive power over another, and that we all have the freedom to make choices. This is what anarchy is about: creating the conditions in which we DO have REAL choices about the ways in which we live our lives. When anarchy? It need not be a distant Revolution or a Great Cataclysm. It is happening now. Anarchist societies are there, lurking below the legacy of greed and violence and war and hunger and oppression. Whenever we engage in an act of mutual aid, whenever people come together voluntarily to share food and fun or to perform a task or get a job done, that is anarchy in action. What the anarchist wants to do, then, is to recognize these situations and turn them into more or less permanent networks that individuals can move in and out of as they need. When neighbors co-operate to do repairs on the streets in their area, or to grow food on a common land, or to fix up abandoned houses for low-income and homeless people, they are in their own way de- legitimizing the government or corporate power and taking matters into their own hands. Of course, it is fine and well to petition the government to spend the money it extorts from us for such things-- after all, it IS OUR WEALTH! But we should not expect the government to be responsive to the real needs of people, as the state exists to protect the rights of the rich and privileged, not the poor and the underemployed or even the middle class. Rather, we should come together and figure out how we can get all the things done DESPITE the state, eventually making its existence irrelevant. Perhaps more and more people working to increase citizen power and participation will find that many of the taxes they pay are unjust, and they only want taxes to go toward schools and libraries and road repair, not toward business incentives or building new super highways or financing the military. Then from the networks of support they are developing, they can create grass roots political initiatives which would alter the ways in which the decisions are made on government spending and greatly increase citizen input. Perhaps eventually people will come to find that the old systems of governing are inadequate and they need and desire more localized and direct control over their lives. This is what community power is all about: an attempt to involve everyone, black and white and latino and asian, women and men, young and old, gay and straight, Christian/Jew/Muslim/Hindu/Atheist, in the decision making processes of the community. And for the anarchist, it is about equalizing this involvement so that power, as well as resources and wealth, be shared in common. Finally, as an anarchist I see equality and cooperation as the only way to organize a society wherein the individual can develop her potential and exercise her liberty to the greatest extent possible. We can begin this transformation here and now by highlighting what is already good and existent in human relations, and by simultaneously developing new kinds of networks. We donUt have to build Revolutionary Parties or high-powered Congressional Lobby Organizations to do the work of social change. It takes groups of people committed to the idea and benefits of anarchy, community power, worker control, respect and tolerance, and true democracy who can get together and get things done, all the while sharing their successes and failures honestly with other groups who are trying similar things elsewhere. It means collaborating with those who are different in some way or another from you, and respecting those differences and learning something from them in the process. It means supporting and learning from groups who have long resisted the powers of the state, such as Native Americans and Afrikan Americans who face state-directed brutality and economic coercion on a daily basis in the inner cities and on the reservations of the U.S. It requires an international perspective so that we connect our struggles with those of groups in other parts of the world who are fighting tyranny, coercion, death squads, oppression, poverty, hunger, and disease. And finally it takes a sane mixture of rage and patience, as either sensibility alone dooms us to failure and futility. List of Resources Practical Anarchy Quarterly magazine produced by a vegetarian librarian that stresses clear writing and the sharing of practical information. Recent topical issues: Anarchy & Voting, Women & Anarchy. Wind Chill Factor PO Box 81961 Chicago, IL 60681 Militant Do-It-Yourself urban anarchist magazine. Generally packed with articles and graphics. Topics include: gentrification, Native American issues, Anarchist Black Cross work ( political prisoner support), reports on demonstrations and protests, and much more. These folks also distribute pamphlets and records, so write to them for a list of available materials! Anarchy! A Journal of Desire Armed c/o CAL PO Box 1466 Columbia, MO 65205-1466 Provacative quarterly journal that spans both anarchist theory and practice. One of the best sources of news and information on international anarchist activity today. Features lengthy articles as well as rants, essays, book and magazine reviews, cartoons, and the famed collage work of Baer, Being, and Keohnline. Love and Rage ( Amor y Rabia) Box 3 Prince St Station NYNY 10012 Revolutionary anarchist tabloid of the Love & Rage network. Plenty of news and information on anarchist activity as well as business of the L&R net. Profane Existence PO Box 8722 Minneapolis, MN 55408 RMaking punk a threat againS is the (hopeful) subtitle of this tabloid. This collective endeavor attempts to wed the subcultural expressions of punk to the political ideas and goals of anarchy, with some success. Always an interesting read for getting a feel for the politicized wing of punk culture. Dumpster Times PO Box 80044 Akron, OH 44308 Produced by the incomprable (and indominable) Wendy Duke, this publication is always thought-provoking, with lots of writing from the heart. Never petty, boring, or sectarian, Wendy assembles articles and cartoons that are at times light and humorous, and just as often serious and urgent. dreamtime village c/o xexoxial endarchy 1341 Williamson Madison, WI 53703 An intentional community in rural Wisconson devoted to the practice of anarchist-style cooperative living, and the creation of small-scale sustainable life and culture. Write them to get on theri mailing list for information on their activities. Perennial Books PO Box B14 Montague, MA 01351 Distributor of a variety of new and used books of interest to anarchists and anti-authoritarians. Write for their catalogue. The Shadow PO Box 20296 NYNY 10009 Anarchist squatter tabloid from the Lower East Side of NYC. Good for familiarizing yourself with the housing struggles in that community. The Match c/o Fred Woodworth PO Box 3488 Tuscon, AZ 85722 Fred is a real character, and he produces a high-quality journal using offset press technology. Strong in the area of fiction and personable essays (FredUs personality always shines through.) Anarchist Youth Federation PO Box 365 Canal St Station NYNY 10013- 0365 The AYF is a loosely affiliated network of chapters around the country which generally serves the needs of the young and young at heart. Basically a good contact for sharing resources and building youth solidarity accross the continent. Write to find out how you can start an AYF chapter in your town. The Web Collective PO Box 40890 San Francisco, CA 94110 A group of Bay Area anti-authoritarian activists currently working on a Direct Action Manual, among other things. BAD Brigade PO Box 1323 Cambridge, MA 02238 This organization produces numerous pamphlets and broadsides on a great variety of topics, such as war, pornography, electoral politics, and so on. This is just a small sampling of what is out there--and here I focused on projects within the US alone! Through any and all of these publications and organizations you will be introduced to many others, spanning the vibrant international anarchist scene. Good luck, and feel free to contact the Bloomington Anarchist Union for more information! If you donUt contact us, feel free anyway....