Another consideration is that for every act of highly visible resistance there are many acts of lesser anarchy that get no publicity yet have cumulative effect. Inspiration to small but numerous secretive acts of sabotage, defection, losing paperwork, slow-walking—this adds up.
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We’re powerfully trained to be socially compliant even when we recognize that we’re complicit in stupidity or evil. So seeing others refuse compliance has power. And daily exercise of small acts of defiance make possible larger acts when our moment arrives.
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Yes, my problem is not with subversion or disobedience which, one might add, are not anarchist tactics per se.
(Was Gandhi an anarchist? Was Havel? Mandela?)
My problem isn't even really with anarchism, but...
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... with the not inconsiderable number of anarchists who talk grandiosely about how all states and nations are illegitimate and must be dissolved.
And this without any theory for how to do so that hasn't repeatedly proved unequal to the task, obviously, since it's some goal!
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So anarchism becomes a sort of toolbox ideology, good for working cracks into totalizing systems.
But to actually create a better society at scale, I think we need more..
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I want to go from 1 billion starving people to near-zero, wanton waste & pollution to something the planet can absorb. How to get there is the big question, for me
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The other side of anarchism is mutualism, the whole social toolbox of cooperative strategies by which free people care for each other, cultivating and protecting the commons from seizure and privatization.
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This mutualism is what state and capital have eroded so badly that we scarcely believe it could exist even when we hear about communities who live in mutuality.
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How does living without so much coercion work and how does it scale to cope with destruction of the global commons? Yeah, that's the $64 question!
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Yes. The mutualism is the aspect of anarchism that redeems it to me as more than poseur politics.
The local anarchists are dicks, but they stage soup kitchens for the homeless instead of trying to take over the local socialist chapter and whitewash Stalin like the Marxists do.
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My problem is that the state seems to be little more than this predatory structure whose origin story is in warlords subjugating the local mutualists.
What antibodies have we developed to that? Because if we haven't got any, we'd just be opening the same ecological niche again.
"hi guys, local prosperous, happy society here. We're not very militaristic and we actually produce a whole bunch of cool stuff that you shitheads are too busy killing each other to figure out.
Pleeeeease don't enslave us...?"