By Cake Boy

So, let’s dig a little bit deeper into this idea of pluralist anarchism. Isn’t it farfetched, isn’t it utopian?

Anarchists say because centralized power is dangerous, decentralization is the way to go to reduce damage. There will be damage anyway, because humans are imperfect, but we can try to reduce the damage. Anarchism, then, is harm reduction. The anarchists say states as institutions are too big, too opaque, too impersonal, and too reckless. You want smaller social units. This isn’t a very strange viewpoint, even when you look at it from a very dry, technical, game theory point of view

But how do you get to such a world? To be honest, in the past, we saw that anarchism always arose in situations of great social unrest. When a system collapses, movements like communism and anarchism step in. The system Spain was in decline, the anarchists used this power vacuum, they collectivized the land, and democratized the factories, and got rid of all bureaucrats and officials in their region. The anarchists didn’t create social unrest and didn’t initiate the war, but when the war was there, they took it as an opportunity to experiment with their ideas. This was beneficial because now we know a little more about economics, sociology, and the capacity of human beings. See it as a test lab.

The thing is, when we look at communism, at first, it was just an idea some dreamers had. But in the end, the communists actually created communist states in the world.

Liberalism/republicanism began as an idea some intellectuals had. But now we live in that idea. The same could be the case for anarchism.

Also, we don’t have all the information. We can only assume what a social system will be like if we look at republican neoliberalism. There are positive sides to this system. The fact that there is a degree of free speech and personal/artistic freedom is a positive side of American neoliberalism. There are also opposing sides to it, its inequality, social control, corporatism, and imperialism. The same goes for social democracy. When, after the Second World War, politicians created social democracy in Europe, the intellectuals didn’t know what it would look like or what the outcome would be. In the end, the system seemed to have positive and negative sides. The positive was, for example, a social housing sector with low rents. A negative side was a pretty big bureaucracy, and that could, in theory, get out of hand.

The same would be the case for the pluralist anarchist experiment. There will be things that work and things that don’t work. Positive and negative sides. Some things will be more positive than you would have thought, and some will be more negative than you would have thought.

Anarchism is always experimentation and futurism. It’s not a very pragmatic political program, it’s something for ‘hemel bestormers’ as we say in Holland. Translated: People who storm the heaven. But in every era, some people stick to what they have, and people push the boundaries of what is perceived as possible. For me personally, this is a downside of the anarchist project. I myself am attracted to pragmatism by nature. I think it’s hard to sell something that’s very abstract and very big to people. I actually wrote these pieces to think with the people who do want to storm heaven. Because if they are serious about anarchism, we have to make it up to date again.

Yesterday I was thinking about this pluralist anarchist vision we talked about. So, this system that consists of commons, in combination with different social models that exist next to each other, which people can freely join. I see some positive sides to this pluralist social model. In this vision, the social systems have to compete with the commons. And they have to compete with each other. For example, an anarcho capitalist landlord, can’t have rents that are too high, because than the tenant goes to homestead the commons, or he goes to the socialist zone. The socialist zone can’t have a tax that is too high because then the people go to the capitalist zone, etc. It’s a market of social systems and ways of life. The systems don’t claim the people, but the people claim the systems. Now, it’s the other way around. From a pragmatic point of view, competition between different social units would be beneficial. Rothbard talked about competition between currencies. Of course, anarchism would mean a market in currencies, but I think anarchism should go even further than that. Competition between possibilities. When people can opt-out, then you can’t exploit them. And monopoly is the enemy of individual freedom. So, anarchism should always mean the possibility of choosing a different arrangement.