By Cake Boy
Anarchism can’t win; it can’t defend itself, a Marxist once said. And we have to be honest; this is a reasonable objection.
How do you defend yourself against China, Iran, and the US? With your ‘local anarchist militias’? This isn’t very realistic.
The young Western anarchist adolescents who talk about ‘the revolution’ aren’t serious. It’s just child play, and most people can see this.
But when we look at anarchism in practice, in the past, it always could arise in a situation of social unrest. In the context of the Spanish civil war, the anarchist masses could find space to experiment with their collectivism—something that was never done before. The anarchists did not themselves attack the government. They wouldn’t have the striking force to do that. They were reactive.
We see that communists are able actually to attack a state and even win. Anarchists can’t do that because they are too decentralized, and their forces aren’t made for something like that. Their military was always more defensive than offensive. If you don’t want to take centralized power, your military will also look different from standard armies.
We then have anarchism as a guerilla force. The current Zapatistas in Mexico are, in a way, anarchists (in our terminology). And we see that they can claim territory through guerilla practices. This would only work in very specific areas of the world. With the Zapatistas, we also see this as a defensive form of organization. They don’t fight to take over the state but to protect their way of life against invasive neoliberalism.
The Marxist then could say, how do you change the world if you’re just defensive?
We can also see the goal of pluralist anarchism as a prolonged process. A decentralization process is a bit like how, for example, an object disintegrates over decades. For example, a libertarian nation could experiment with decentralizing, with more local self-governance and federalism, and with a policy to legalize homesteading. This would then be an example for other countries, and some would follow their example. Slowly, a part of the world moved to a pluralist model. Anarchism would then mean soft power. In a way like water is smooth, but it can also carve out rocks. Communism is a hard power, but it also breaks very easily. The way a stick is hard, but it’s also easy to break.
All of this is ‘larger than life’. We talk about very big concepts. In a way, it’s a bit like religion. I think this is something we should keep in mind when we discuss these topics.
So, what have we seen? Militarily speaking, anarchism was always reactive and defensive, and it operated in crises—situations in which it was needed.
And, reaching a world, or a zone in the world of pluralism, would probably be a very slow process. It’s not something you can achieve with ‘revolutions’, I think. Because revolutions often lead to new centralized arrangements. Anarchists will not initiate revolutions, but they will partake in conflicts when they are already there.
The question is, can anarchism be serious again and compete with, for example, the neoliberal and socialist parties in the world, or will it remain an adolescent image? The texts I wrote were meant to answer this complicated question.
The first step would be if masses of normal people saw pluralist anarchism as a legitimate desire/goal and talked openly about it. Of course, this is not the case in this period of time.
If you want to answer, think with me; this can be through Preston. He will mail me your reaction.
