From Libertarian Labyrinth by Shawn P. Wilbur
What follows is a long Twitter thread, originally intended for the audience there as a response to certain criticisms of the historical account developed by myself and others regarding mutualism. It’s a mix of reflections on our search for the perhaps ultimately illusory core of “the mutualism tradition” and thoughts on how to apply the lessons learned in the course of that exploration.
So much energy is wasted in debating anarchist labels that we imagine designate historical tendencies with clear programs, but mostly emerged from contexts where the rich diversity of anarchist ideas was reduced to forms appropriate for some earlier round of sectarian debate.
Most of the keywords we fight over in anarchist circles are neither that sort of label not anti-concepts. They are the sort of obvious constructions (individualism, socialism, mutualism, capitalism, feminism, etc.) that you would to be contested in ideology-centered discourse.
They tend to lack single origins. Their histories are characterized by conflict, schism, attempts at definition from rivals and opponents. Narrowly ideological approaches, including some accepted in history of ideas circles, have trouble capturing the real and specific pluralism.
In anarchist circles, most of these labels function primarily as place-holders for diverse histories that anarchists might explore—or they function as excuses for not exploring further.
There is seldom anything like an orthodox position available to adopt—and the strongest claims regarding the orthodoxy of any of these broad currents are almost certain to come from those rivals and opponents.
“Anarchism” is interesting in this context, simply because it was such a late addition to the modern political lexicon. The conditions of its emergence make the relations between tendencies that adopted the label seem more arborial in structure.
It would be tempting to treat “anarchism” as largely a libertarian communist invention, driven by events in the International, then almost immediately contested by anarchist individualists and anti-authoritarian collectivists.
But the early accounts, like Kropotkin’s “On Order” and the fanciful framing of Bakunin’s “God and the State,” complicate the picture, as the anarchist communists obviously understood their task as a kind of entry into an already existing current.
The complex, ambiguous relationship between “anarchism” and the ideas of anarchists like Proudhon, Bakunin, Déjacque, Bellegarrigue, etc. is, at this point, probably a permanent element in these discussions.
But if we were honest with ourselves, I suspect we might conclude that complexity and ambiguity are the main qualities of anarchists’ relations to “anarchism” and of all the manifestation of “anarchism” to itself. These only seem to be real problems when we pretend otherwise.
