So what is it when you see society as a series of interlocking systems and institutions whose primary mission is to perpetuate those systems and institutions, often in cruel and inhuman ways, but almost always subtly, barely perceivable by those who are enslaved by the ideology of those systems? (Edit: I’m not entirely totalatarian/bleak about this; there is room for human connection even in a gulag.)
I think it starts with birth, when our parents decide to have children for their own ends. Then we are assigned a role inside that family system–savior, scapegoat, healer, mediator, surrogate parent, etc. We are taught how to see the world, to see relationships, in ways that benefit the family system. It’s not abuse, it’s love. We are taught to shut down, to not listen to our own voices, because to be independent, to see that the family system is there to serve itself and not you, the child, is emotionally- and maybe life-threatening.
Then it continues in school. In the most pessimistic systems, teachers–whatever there original desires to teach were–are there to fulfill metrics, and those that meet metrics are rewarded, and those that do not are punished. Your role isn´t to learn about who you are, or to develop as a human, but to fulfill the metrics the teachers have. Teachers who take time to learn about you or foster your growth as an individual are eventually weeded out.
Then maybe you go to work, maybe professional work. Your first job is to make your employer feel good about themselves and make them look good to THEIR superiors. If you are in a profession, your other role is to affirm the legitimacy of the profession. You are never to acknowledge that the system is corrupt, that the institution is there primarily to serve itself.
Then in our personal lives, in need of companionship, we make an arrangement with someone else: “I’ll be who you want me to be if you be who I want you to be.” And when this fails to satisfy us, we decide to have children, and the process continues.
I don’t have much hope. Yes, I do think a French-style revolution will somewhat reset the clock on capitalist exploitation, but ultimately, this is just HUMAN behavior. As long as we live in a society, we will create systems and institutions, and we will sacrifice our individuality to gain the protection of those systems and institutions. It is a cycle only escapable only by a few individuals, and at great cost.
So what is this called?
I’ll drop my personal experiences in a comment below because I’ve already shared the highlights before.
I got into anarchism briefly as privileged white teenager and it kind of has a halo of shame around it. Like Marx, I think there’s valid criticism of the system, but the solutions seem questionable. I guess the problem is how do you free peoples minds when, for the most part, its much easier to accept the dominant ideology and rejecting it comes at such a high cost. Revolutions happen only when people are pushed into situations they can literally not survive.
Ever do any research on collectives of homeless people? That’s some interesting shit, politically speaking. I haven´t heard more than a passing podcast about it, though.
It’s not at all off-topic. I actually added a photo from They Live a few minutes after I posted! Maybe it didn´t arrive to your instance. I don´t know what you mean by inviting people over to “watch movies.” I’d invite people over to “watch movies” and I´d show them the Battlestar Galactica mini-series and I´d want to tell them about how BSG is implicitly a critique of Star Trek, from everything from social systems, to technology, to camera angles, but usually they´d want to fuck before we even got to Ragnar Anchorage. People are disappointing.
So here’s the thing: if you say anarchy to most people they have literally no clue what that means and associate it with riots and oppositional defiance. That’s intentional, of course. Because the idea of people working together without the threat from power is terrifying. What if people cooperated instead of being coerced to serve capital? Madness!
The common argument is that no one will do the hard or dirty jobs but that’s also not grounded in reality. It’s easy to ignore that people love contributing to the collective good and solving problems if you have never been an “unskilled” or “blue collar” worker or talked to them. If you take away the coercion of wage labour and lack of health and safety caused by the drive to cut expenses I can assure you that you will find people who enjoy and excel at any task imaginable.
You don’t need to call it anarchy and it isn’t all or nothing. I do my best to live my life according to my principles. Some examples: I’m an engineer. I do well at my job because I reject the hierarchy of engineers over operators or builders. I understand we are all part of a whole with the same goals and we all bring important skills, knowledge and experience. I don’t tell people I care about what a maintenance helper thinks because I am an anarchist. It just makes sense to gather everyone’s thoughts when solving problems. I garden and share my harvest with my community because I reject individualism. I volunteer to mentor young engineers and listen to their struggles and worries because it’s the right thing to do and I gain nothing by gate keeping. Media is full of maternal figures who make room at the table for kids who might not eat enough at home. The idea of “it takes a village” to raise a child. All of that is rejection of coercive control but it’s not a young man with a spiky mohawk so it doesn’t count?
Comrade, I’ve been poor. Does research include engaging in mutual aid with other poor people including the unhoused? Maybe I’m taking this too literally.
I saw the image which is why I mentioned it 🤭
Yes, I’ll admit I don’t really understad what anarchism is. I’m embarassed by it not because of Mohawks, but because if its incarnation in me as more radical libertarianism. I did do my due diligence–I read V for Vendetta cover to cover several times, and all I’ll learned is that even V didn’t know what the hell was or how to make it happen. “This isn’t anarchy, Evey, it’s chaos.”
So it’s just people working together absent coercion?
I just watching Office Space and they had that discussion of “what would you do with a million dollars?” and Michael Bolton (no relation) says “That’s a stupid question, if everyone had a million dollars, nobody would be a janitor.”
I really love my job at fast food. Everybody’s on a team working together to reach a goal and that’s a lot of fun–I think you may have replied to that topic. I might do it for free if I didn’t need to work for money. Ironically, the only thing that makes me not willing to do it for free is the MANAGER, who is just awful. Or maybe not ironically. Maybe management is there to make sure they are extracting every last bit of profit from you, so it makes perfect sense she’s the only reason I wouldn’t like my job.
No, you took it exactly as literally as I intended it. I keep looking for “mutual aid”, but all I’ve found are big agencies who’ve co-opted the phrase. Part of the issue with society now is everything needs a website and an SEO to be found, and then it’ll be found first by scammers…
But the question about homeless people is sort of a where-the-rubber-meets-the-road situation of organization. The problem, of course, is that homeless groups are not recognized and their ecampments are raised and tents maliciosly slashed and property maliciously seized. There ARE formal acknowledgments of sovereignty in some rare instances.
I haven’t been truly poor yet, my parents have always been there to bail me out, but I don’t hold a lot of hope for my future. I’m thinking my next vehicle is going to be a hybrid mini-van I can live out of if need be, but I don’t know how I’m going to afford one.
I get the feeling my light hearted tone came across as mocking or snarky so please accept my apology if that is the case.
One of the pitfalls (again, by design!) is that complex things are not served by imprecise labels. We are discouraged from understanding each other and instead sorted into teams. The world is framed as a series of debates that can be won. There is no winning an argument about how to care for each other!
This is a problem we need to work on together. I am not saying this to suggest I have some wisdom others don’t. I am likely failing at upholding this value without knowing it because of the complexity and diversity of how individuals experience the world and how they express these experiences. I depend on my comrades to call me out when I fail. It’s a lot to ask someone to tell you when you fuck up but I feel like autistic people might be in the unique position to understand the value. It takes trust and care to make a space this can happen and to not make it a disproportionate burden to the marginalized.
I feel like I need to add a clarification: understanding each other means receiving the information a person is trying to share with you as they intend for it to be received instead of framing it according to ones own world view and interpretation. When I say that we need to understand each other instead of focusing on dogma people respond with concepts like the Paradox of Tolerance but I think the disconnect is the different meanings of the word understanding and they are stretching what I am saying into something it’s not.
I will explain with an cheeky example because I am so bored about talking about fascists: Lets say someone introduces themselves as a Marxist. An unhelpful gut reaction I have is that they buy in to the idea of the lumpenproletariat in a specific, narrow way that I find harmful. Instead of being like “they must be ableist, I will ignore them”, I will try to get to know them and understand them in the context of the bounds of our relationship. I’m not going to interrogate them on the subject. I don’t see a way that can be done that isn’t an attempt to shame them or placing myself above them. They gave me a simplified description of their philosophy, they didn’t say they take the writings of a wealthy dead white guy from almost 200 years ago and apply it as a literal road map to how the current world should be approached.
If what we are collaborating on includes the potential to do harm to others because they think the lumpen are worthless and a danger then yeah, we need to talk about it and clarify goals. If the example is Food not Bombs maybe collectively we agree this person isn’t the right person to be distributing the food to people as they come up because of the risk of making someone feel unwelcome. But it doesn’t mean they can’t be involved so long as we have the common goal of freely distributing vegan food. This discussion about roles and goals isn’t public and isn’t thrust upon unwilling people who will feel unsafe hearing it. I’m not “tolerating” the expression of ideas that harm others, I’m ensuring I understand if this person has ideas (biases?) that can harm others instead of assuming it from incomplete information. I don’t think it’s possible to be an anarchist without applying abolitionist principles to your daily life because the focus has to be on how we can care for each other versus who is “bad”.
Wow that was a lot of preface to reply to your questions 😅
The way I phrased it was sloppy. I just meant to say that society praises some forms of ignoring hierarchy (i.e. sharing) versus others (hair cuts people don’t like).
I struggle with the label of libertarianism. Depending on who you are talking to they might use that word instead of anarchy and have the same world view as I do, or they could mean that they get sad when capitalists are asked to fund social programs.
I find your anecdote very charming and illustrative! I would not have thought of that book as being a representation of anarchist thought. I will admit I only saw the movie and didn’t read the book because I had a visceral reaction to the whole “I tortured you to free your mind” thing. It is paternalistic and coercive and I don’t see it defendable as an anarchist action. Maybe I missed the authors point and it’s not intended to be seen as a good thing.
If I was going to recommend a book to people it would be The Conquest of Bread. More wealthy dead white guys from the 1800s lol! The utility of a book by someone like that is that it is a bit easier for privileged white people to make the connections because it is directly addressing a lot of the concepts that are used to defend individualistic capitalism. It’s not a manual, it’s an exploration of ideas at a time of great social change. It reflects one persons views in the context of the world as they experience it.
Maybe we can take a step back from that? Let’s say anarchy is the rejection of arbitrary and harmful hierarchy. I know I brought up coercive control but I think that is limiting to focus on. How people perceive hierarchy and how they apply the rejection of it to any number of situations is highly variable. Some concrete examples: think speciesism is an arbitrary and harmful hierarchy because it is used to permit and justify treating animals as commodities but the Hierarchy of Controls , while totally arbitrary is more of an agreed upon way of prioritizing approaches to safety. People can agree to use the hierarchy of controls but animals cannot agree to being commodified, if that makes sense?
I agree with your analysis. The problem is the threat that we must do what serves capital or we will be without our material needs. It’s hard to talk about this with people who are so worn down that they really do need a year or two of zero expectations and demands on them before they can start to think about what they enjoy doing. If you add on the way certain work is considered so worthless it is not compensated (like childcare, household management) it’s easy to understand why people see it as impossible. Engaging with anarchy needs room for creativity digging into concepts and words that have different meaning for different people.
I’m not sure if this is asking me to explain the concept so I am going to err on the side of doing it. Kropotkin presents mutual aid as the opposite to the idea of “survival of the fittest”. Charity and philanthropy is not mutual aid.
Okay, I think I understand. I have heard the term “informal economy” used to describe ways people who are excluded from participating in the dominant society address their needs. I don’t like the term but I use it to answer your question with yes 😊 While I never lived in an encampment my personal experiences with surviving in the margins and comradeship with others who have had similar challenges have given me first and second hand experience with the topic. I continue to work towards finding “informal” solutions to reduce barriers.
I am sorry to hear about your worries and hope for a happy future for you.
There surely must be a BEST way to care for each other, though? I think my way of caring about other is clearly superior to your way. /s
I’m not a my-team/your-team type person, or, at least, I want the broadest “team” possible, starkly contrasted. For instance, I used to go to an open mic at an LGBTQ coffee house. I thought being a leftist minority with an interesting personal history would be enough to get me “in”, but despite my best efforts, I couldn’t be accepted, probaby because I was too old for most of the 20-somethings. I personally feel a kinship with anyone who has been excluded, but it seems like most people don’t identify with anyone who hasn’t been excluded for the same reason. “What we learn from being excluded by others for who we are is to form our own group to exclude others for not being exactly like us.” I think I’ve shared that with you before (?) but I low-key hate humanity now.
I used to be very defensive about criticism, but now I crave it; largely because I can (better) consider criticism without taking it to be devaluing my humanity. I’m playing some songs tonight, and I’m curious what other musicians think, but I’m very happy with what I’ve done, so I would be looking at their criticisms as, “What could I do to improve this?” and not “I suck and everyone hates me.”
But, and again I’m sorry to retread things with you if we’ve already discussed it before, but my willingness to critique was a fatal liability in my last job.
Your lumpenprole-believer is a bit of a funny example; I’m sure those guys are out there. Terry Pratchett has a delightlful takedown of a certain brand of communist revolutionary who has absolute contempt for the people they are trying to “liberate.” I think maybe a more interesting example would be the type of person that thinks killing villagers to terrorize them into supporting the revolution would be a more apt test of your tolerance.
I think the problem with V is that what he really is a combination of Nietzschean Superman and avenging spirit, and the anarchy is just sort of tacked on… But there doesn’t seem to be very many good guides to Anarchism–maybe because it’s more of an approach than a program? I’ll have a look at your book. But I do remember the anarchists at the turn of the century, I learned about them in highschool, but they never really taught us what they believed–which is a curious oversight, no?
Re: Mutual aid. I know what it is, and I also social welfare agencies love to get on bandwagons, so they’ll reframe a clothing drive as “mutual aid” when there’s really nothing mutual about it.
I’m going to dig around to see if I can find that podcast I was listening to. Check for edits.
Edit: Check out this podcast: Understanding Homelessness Podcast https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/understanding-homelessness-podcast/6502775 via @PodcastAddict
Episode 6, I think, is the one that talks about organizing groups for self determination.
Makes me so grateful to have a girlfriend that excitedly asks to watch BSG with me. (Although I’m looking forward to being done with the new caprica arcs)
<3 10/10, flawless.