Chapter 7 : Neighboring Societies

7. Neighboring Societies

Because anarchism opposes domination and enforced conformity, an anarchist revolution would not create a completely anarchist world. Anarchist societies would need to find peaceful ways of coexisting with neighboring societies, defending themselves from authoritarian neighbors, and supporting liberation in societies with oppressive internal dynamics.

Could an anarchist society defend itself from an authoritarian neighbor?

Some people worry that an anarchist revolution would be a pointless venture because an anti-authoritarian society would quickly be conquered by an authoritarian neighbor. Of course, an anarchist revolution is not a strictly national affair limiting itself to the borders of the government it is overthrowing. The idea is not to create a small pocket of freedom where we can hide or retire, but to abolish systems of slavery and domination on a worldwide scale. Because some areas might liberate themselves before others, the question remains whether an anarchist society could be safe from an authoritarian neighbor.

Actually, the answer is no. States and capitalism are imperialist by nature, and they will always try to conquer neighbors and universalize their rule: the elite class of hierarchical societies are already at war with their own lower classes, and they extend this logic to their relations with the rest of the world, which becomes nothing but a pool of resources for them to exploit so as to win more advantages in their unending war. Anarchist societies, meanwhile, encourage revolution in authoritarian societies both through intentional solidarity with rebels in those societies and by providing a subversive example of freedom, showing the subjects of the state that they do not need to live in fear and submission. So in fact, neither of these societies would be safe from the other. But an anarchist society would by no means be defenseless.

The anarchist society of southern Ukraine at the end of the First World War was a major threat to the German and Austrian empires, the White Army, the short-lived nationalist Ukrainian state, and the Soviet Union. The volunteer militias of the Makhnovists inspired major desertions from the ranks of the authoritarian Red Army, forced out the Austro-Germans and the nationalists who tried to lay claim to their lands, and aided the defeat of the White Army. This is especially remarkable considering that they were armed almost entirely with weapons and ammunition seized from the enemy. Coordinating forces of up to tens of thousands, the anarchists regularly fought on multiple fronts and shifted between frontal and guerrilla warfare with a fluidity conventional armies are incapable of. Despite always being vastly outnumbered, they defended their land for several years. At two decisive battles, Peregonovka and the Perekop isthmus, the Makhnovist militias smashed the larger White Army, which was supplied by Western governments.

Extraordinary mobility and a bag of clever tricks constituted Makhno’s chief tactical devices. Traveling on horseback and in light peasant carts (tatchanki) on which machine guns were mounted, his men [ed: and women] moved swiftly back and forth across the open steppe between the Dnieper and the Sea of Azov, swelling into a small army as they went, and inspiring terror in the hearts of their adversaries. Hitherto independent guerrilla bands accepted Makhno’s command and rallied behind his black banner. Villagers willingly provided food and fresh horses, enabling the Makhnovtsy to travel 40 or 50 miles a day with little difficulty. They would turn up quite suddenly where least expected, attack the gentry and military garrisons, then vanish as quickly as they had come[...] When cornered, the Makhnovtsy would bury their weapons, make their way singly back to their villages, and take up work in the fields, awaiting the next signal to unearth a new cache of arms and spring up again in an unexpected quarter. Makhno’s insurgents, in the words of Victor Serge, revealed “a truly epic capacity for organization and combat.”[115]

After their supposed allies, the Bolsheviks, endeavored to impose bureaucratic control over southern Ukraine while the Makhnovists were fighting at the front, they successfully waged guerrilla warfare against the massive Red Army for two years, aided by popular support. The ultimate defeat of the Ukrainian anarchists demonstrates the need for greater international solidarity. If other uprisings against the Bolsheviks had been better coordinated, they might not have been able to concentrate so much of their might on smashing the anarchists in Ukraine — likewise if libertarian socialists in other countries had spread news of the Bolshevik repression rather than all rallying behind Lenin. An anti-authoritarian rebellion in one corner of the world might even be able to defend itself from the government it is overthrowing and several neighboring governments, but not from all the governments of the entire world. Global repression must be met with global resistance. Fortunately, as capital globalizes, popular networks do as well; our ability to form worldwide movements and act quickly in solidarity with a struggle on the other side of the planet is greater than ever before.

In parts of pre-colonial Africa, anarchic societies were able to exist side-by-side with “predatory states” for centuries because the terrain and available technology favored “defensive warfare with bows and arrows — the ‘democratic’ weapon of warfare since anyone can have one.”[116] The Seminole tribe of Florida provide an inspiring example of a stateless, anarchistic society persisting despite the best efforts of an extremely powerful, technologically advanced neighboring state with a population thousands of times larger. The Seminole, whose name originally means “runaways,” formed out of several indigenous nations, principally the Western Creek, fleeing genocide through the southeastern part of what white people had decided was the United States. The Seminole also included a significant number of escaped African slaves and even a few white Europeans who had run away from the oppressive society of the United States.

The inclusivity of the Seminole demonstrates how indigenous Americans viewed tribe and nation as matters of voluntary association and acceptance within a community, rather than the restrictive ethnic/hereditary categories they are assumed to be in Western civilization. The Seminole call themselves the “unconquered people” because they never signed a peace treaty with the colonizers. They survived a series of wars waged against them by the United States and managed to kill 1,500 US soldiers and an unknown number of militiamen. During the Second Seminole War, from 1835 to 1842, the one thousand Seminole warriors in the Everglades employed guerrilla tactics to devastating effect, even though they faced 9,000 professional, well-equipped soldiers. The war cost the US government $20 million, a huge sum at the time. By the end of the war, the US government had managed to force most of the Seminole into exile in Oklahoma, but gave up on conquering the remaining group, who never surrendered and continued to live free of government control for decades.

The Mapuche are a large indigenous group living on land now occupied by the states of Chili and Argentina. Traditionally they made decisions with consensus and a minimum of hierarchy. Lacking any kind of state apparatus did not prevent them from defending themselves. Before the European invasion, they successfully defended themselves from their hierarchical neighbors, the Inca, who were, by European standards, far more advanced. During the Spanish conquest, the Inca fell quickly, but the Mapuche lands became known as the “Spanish Cemetery.” After the Mapuche defeated the conquistadors in a series of wars spanning a hundred years, Spain signed the treaty of Killin, admitting its failure to conquer the Mapuche and recognizing them as a sovereign nation. Mapuche sovereignty was further recognized in 28 subsequent treaties.

In their wars against the Spanish, Mapuche groups unified under elected war leaders (Taqui or “ax carriers”). Unlike troops in a military, the groups maintained their autonomy and fought freely rather than under coercion. This lack of hierarchy and coercion proved to be a military advantage for the Mapuche. Throughout the Americas, hierarchical indigenous groups like the Inca and Aztecs were defeated quickly by the invaders, as they often surrendered after the loss of the leader or capital. They were also weakened by revenge attacks from the enemies they had made by conquering neighboring groups before the Europeans arrived. The anarchistic indigenous groups were often the ones most capable of waging guerrilla warfare against the occupiers.

From 1860–65, the Mapuche were invaded and “pacified” by the Chilean and Argentinian states, a genocide that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The invaders began a process of suppressing the Mapuche language and Christianizing the conquered people. But Mapuche resistance continues, and thanks to this a number of Mapuche communities still enjoy a relative degree of autonomy. Their resistance remains a threat to the security of the Chilean state; as of this writing, several Mapuche are imprisoned under Pinochet-era anti-terrorism laws for attacks against forestry plantations and copper mines that were destroying the land.

Fierce indigenous resistance was not the only major barrier to colonialism. As resources were forcibly transferred from the Americas to Europe, a phenomenon arose from the long and proud tradition of banditry to strike fear into the hearts of merchants trafficking gold and slaves. Writers from Daniel Defoe to Peter Lamborn Wilson have portrayed piracy as a struggle against Christendom, capitalism and its predecessor mercantilism, and government. Pirate havens were a constant threat to established order — disruptors of globalized plunder under colonialism, instigators of slave rebellions, refuges where lower class runaways could retreat and join in the war against their former masters. The pirate republic of Salé, near what is now the capital of Morocco, pioneered forms of representative democracy a century before the French revolution. In the Caribbean, many of the runaways joined the remnants of indigenous societies and adopted their egalitarian structures. This pirate social class also contained many proto-anarchist social revolutionaries, such as Levelers, Diggers and Ranters, banished to English penal colonies in the New World. Many pirate captains were elected and immediately recallable.

The authorities were often shocked by their libertarian tendencies; the Dutch Governor of Mauritius met a pirate crew and commented: “Every man had as much say as the captain and each man carried his own weapons in his blanket.” This was profoundly threatening to the order of European society, where firearms were restricted to the upper classes, and provided a stark contrast to merchant ships where anything that could be used as a weapon was kept under lock and key, and to the navy where the primary purpose of the marines stationed on naval vessels was to keep the sailors in their place.[117]

Pirate societies cultivated greater gender equality as well, and a number of pirate captains were women. Many pirates thought of themselves as Robin Hoods, and few considered themselves subjects of any state. While numerous other pirates engaged in mercantilism, selling their stolen goods to the highest bidders, or even participated in the slave trade, another current in piracy constituted an early force for abolitionism, aiding slave rebellions and involving many ex-slaves. Authorities in North American colonies like Virginia were concerned about connections between piracy and slave insurrections. Fear of slaves running away to join the pirates and rob their former masters, and of racially mixed uprisings, encouraged the development of laws in the colonies to punish racial mixing. These were some of the first juridical attempts to institutionalize segregation and generalize racism among the white lower class.

Throughout the Caribbean and other parts of the world, liberated pirate enclaves thrived for years, though they are shrouded in mystery. The fact that these pirate societies were a widespread and long-lasting problem for the imperial powers, and that many of them were shockingly libertarian, is documented, but other information is lacking, given that they existed at war with the writers of history. It is telling that the best described pirate utopia, Libertalia or alternately Libertatia, is heavily disputed. Many parts of its history are generally recognized to be fictitious, but some sources allege that Libertatia in its entirety never existed while others maintain that its legendary founder, Captain James Misson, was just a literary invention but the pirate settlement itself did exist.

The expanding navies of Great Britain and the United States finally crushed piracy in the 19^th century, but in the 17^th and 18^th centuries pirates constituted a powerful stateless society that waged war against imperialism and government, and enabled thousands of people to liberate themselves at a time when the oppressiveness of Western civilization surpassed all the previous barbarities in world history.

What will we do about societies that remain patriarchal or racist?

Anarchism emphasizes autonomy and local action, but it is not an isolationist or provincial tendency. Anarchist movements have always concerned themselves with global issues and distant struggles. While governments also profess concern about problems in other parts of the world, anarchism is distinguished by its refusal to impose solutions. Statist propaganda claims we need world government to liberate the peoples of oppressive societies, even as the UN, NATO, the US, and other institutions continue to foster oppression and engage in warfare to uphold the hierachical world order[118].

Anarchist approaches are both local and global, premised on autonomy and solidarity. If a neighboring society were patriarchal or racist or oppressive in some other way, an anarchist culture would offer a range of possible responses beyond apathy and “liberation” by force. In all oppressive societies, one can find people fighting for their own freedom. It is much more realistic and effective to support such people, letting them lead their own struggles, rather than trying to deliver liberation the way a missionary delivers “good news.”

When Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Mollie Steimer, and other anarchists were deported from the US to Russia and discovered the oppressive state created by the Bolsheviks, they spread information internationally to encourage protests against the Bolsheviks and support for the many anarchist and other political prisoners. They worked with the Anarchist Black Cross, a political prisoner support organization with chapters internationally, that supported political prisoners in Russia and elsewhere. On several occasions, the international support and solidarity they organized pressured Lenin to temporarily suspend the repression he was levying against his political opponents and to release political prisoners.

The Anarchist Black Cross, originally called the Anarchist Red Cross, formed in Russia during the failed revolution of 1905 to aid those persecuted in the government reaction. In 1907, international chapters formed in London and New York. The international solidarity they mobilized helped keep anarchist prisoners alive, and enabled others to escape. The result was that in 1917, the revolutionary movement in Russia was stronger, enjoyed more international connections, and was better equipped to overthrow the czarist government.

The Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, founded in Kabul in 1977, has struggled for women’s liberation against the violence of Islamic fundamentalists as well as against occupation by regimes like the USSR, which was responsible for assassinating the founder of RAWA in Pakistan in 1987. After fighting the Soviet occupation and the Taliban, they went on to oppose the Northern Alliance that came into power with US backing. Through a series of desperate situations, they remained steadfast in their conviction that liberation can only come from within. Even amid the oppression of the Taliban, they opposed the US invasion in 2001, arguing that if Westerners really wanted to help liberate Afghanistan they had to support Afghan groups fighting to liberate themselves. Their predictions have proved sound, as Afghan women faced many of the same oppressions under the US occupation as they did under the Taliban. According to RAWA: “RAWA believes that freedom and democracy can’t be donated; it is the duty of the people of a country to fight and achieve these values.”[119]

What will prevent constant warfare and feuding?

In statist society, the crisis of warfare has led to a pursuit of unified government at higher and higher levels, ultimately towards world government. This effort has clearly been unsuccessful — after all, war is the health of the state — but success within this model is not even desirable. It is global occupation, not global peace, that a world government strives for. To take the example of Palestine, because it is here that the technologies and methods of control are developed that are later adopted by the US military and governments around the world, the occupation only flares up into visible war once every few years, but the occupiers are constantly fighting an invisible war to preserve and extend their control, with the use of the media, the schools, the criminal justice system, traffic systems, advertisements, minute policies, surveillance, and covert operations. It is only when the Palestinians fight back and a war that cannot be ignored breaks out that the United Nations and the humanitarian organizations jump into action, not to right past and ongoing wrongs but to return to the prior illusion of peace and ensure that these wrongs can never be questioned. Though with less intensity, the same invisible war is fought against indigenous nations, immigrants, ethnic minorities, poor people, workers; everyone who has been colonized or exploited.

In the stateless, small-scale societies of the past, warfare was common but it was not universal, and in many of its manifestations it was not particularly bloody. Some stateless societies never participated in warfare. Peace is a choice, and they chose it by valuing cooperative reconciliation of conflicts and nurturing behaviors. Other stateless societies that did engage in warfare often practiced a harmless, ritualized variety thereof. In some cases, the line between sporting event and warfare is unclear. As described in some anthropological accounts, teams or war parties from two different communities would meet at a prearranged place to fight. The purpose was not to annihilate the other side, or even necessarily to kill anyone. Someone on one side would throw a spear or shoot an arrow, and they would all watch to see if it hit anyone before throwing the next spear. They would often go home after one person got hurt, or even earlier.[120] In warfare as practiced by the Lakota and other Plains Indians of North America, it was more highly valued to touch an enemy with a stick — “counting coup” — than to kill him. Other forms of war were simply raiding — vandalizing or stealing from neighboring communities and often trying to get away before a fight broke out. If these sorts of chaotic fighting were the warfare of an anarchist society, how preferable that would be to the cold, mechanical bloodbaths of the state!

But societies that do not want to war with their neighbors can structure themselves to prevent it. Not having borders is an important first step. Often we can arrive at the truth by simply reversing the rationalizations of the state, and the line about borders keeping us safe can easily be decoded: borders endanger us. If there is a social conflict, violence is much more likely to break out if there is an “us” and a “them.” Clear social divisions and borders prevent reconciliation and mutual understanding and encourage competition and polarization.

Anarchist anthropologist Harold Barclay describes some societies in which each individual is connected to others through multiple, overlapping networks, arising from kinship, marriage, clan affiliations, and so on:

We do have examples of anarchic polities among peoples[...] numbering in the hundreds of thousands and with fairly dense populations, often over 100 people to the square mile. Such social orders may be achieved through a segmentary lineage system which as we have seen already has certain parallels to the anarchist notion of federalism. Or, as among the Tonga and some East African pastoralists, large populations may be integrated by a more complex arrangement which affiliates the individual with a number of cross cutting and bisecting groups so as to extend his or her social ties over a wide area. In other words, individuals and groups constitute a multitude of interconnected loci, which produces the integration of a large social entity, but without any actual centralized co-ordination.[121]

In addition to this self-balancing property of cooperative societies, some stateless peoples have developed other mechanisms to prevent feuds. The Mardu aborigines of western Australia traditionally lived in small bands, but these periodically came together to hold mass meetings, where disputes between individuals or between different groups would be resolved under the eyes of the whole society. In this way, protracted, unaccountable feuding could be avoided, and everyone was on hand to help resolve the conflict. The Konkomba and the Nuer of Africa recognized bilateral kinship relationships and overlapping economic relationships. Insofar as everyone was related to everyone else, there was no clear axis of conflict that might support warfare. A commonly upheld cultural taboo against feuding also encouraged people to resolve disputes peacefully. Anthropologist E.E. Evans Pritchard described Nuer society as “ordered anarchy.”

The anarchist movement today continues to fight against the borders that divide a capitalist world. The anti-authoritarian No Border Network, formed in western Europe in 1999, has since become active throughout Europe and in Turkey, North America, and Australia. No Border efforts include support for illegal immigrants, education about the racism encouraged by government immigration policies, protests against government officials, actions against airlines to halt deportations, and No Border camps spanning the borders of two countries. In the course of the campaign, participants have forcibly opened border crossings between Spain and Morocco, broken into a children’s detention facility in the Netherlands to bring aid and open up communication, partially destroyed a detention facility and sabotaged the companies involved in deportations in Italy, shut down a detention facility in Greece, and freed dozens of immigrants from a detention facility in Australia. No Border camps bring people from many countries together to develop strategies and carry out actions. They often take place on the periphery of expanding “First World” zones — for example, in Ukraine, between Greece and Bulgaria, or between the US and Mexico. Common slogans at No Borders protests include: “No Border, No Nation, Stop Deportations!” “Freedom of Movement, Freedom of Residence: Right to Come, Right to Go, Right to Stay!”

Anarchist societies encourage the free creation of overlapping networks between neighbors, communities, and societies. These networks may include material exchange, cultural communication, friendships, family relationships, and solidarity. There is no clear delineation of where one society ends and another begins, or what the sides would be in a conflict. When there is a feud, the feuding parties are likely to have many social relationships in common, and many third parties will be caught in the middle. In a culture that emphasizes competition and conquest, they may still take sides and offset the possibility of reconciliation. But if their culture values cooperation, consensus, and social connectedness, and their economic relationships reinforce these values, they are more likely to encourage mediation and peace between the feuding parties. They might do so out of a personal desire for peace, because of a concern for the well-being of the people involved in the fight, or out of self-interest, as they also depend on the health of the social networks in question. In such a society, self-interest, community interests, and ideals enjoy a greater confluence than in our own society.

In larger areas or more diverse populations, in which a commonly held cultural ethos and spontaneous conflict resolution may not suffice to protect against serious conflicts, multiple societies can create intentional federations or peace pacts. One example of an anti-authoritarian peace pact with greater longevity than most treaties between states is the confederation enacted among the Haudennosaunne, often referred to as the Iroquois League. The Haudennosaunne are comprised of five nations that all speak similar languages, in the northeastern part of the territory appropriated by the United States and the southern parts of what are now considered to be the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

The confederation was formed around August 31, 1142.[122] It covered a geographically huge area, considering that the only options for transportation were by canoe and on foot. The Haudennosaunne were sedentary agriculturalists who lived with the highest population densities, averaging 200 people per acre, of any inhabitants of the Northeast until the 19^th century.[123] Communal farming lands surrounded walled towns. The five nations involved — Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk — had a long history of infighting, including wars spurred by competition for resources. The confederation was hugely successful in ending this. By all accounts the five nations — and later a sixth, the Tuscarora, who fled English colonization of the Carolinas — lived in peace for over five hundred years, even throughout the genocidal European expansion and trading of guns and alcohol for animal pelts that caused so many other nations to split or war with their neighbors. The confederation finally fractured — only temporarily — during the American revolution, due to differing strategies about which side to support to mitigate the effects of colonization.

The communal economic life of the five nations played an important role in their ability to live in peace; a metaphor often used for the federation was bringing everyone to live together in the same longhouse and eat from the same bowl. All the groups of the federation sent delegates to meet together and provide a structure for communication, conflict resolution, and discussing relationships with neighboring societies. Decisions were made using consensus, subject to approval by the entire society.

The anarcho-syndicalist movement originating in Europe has a history of creating international federations to share information and coordinate struggles against capitalism. These federations could be a direct precedent to global structures that facilitate living in peace and preventing warfare. The International Workers Association (IWA, or AIT in Spanish) contains anarcho-syndicalist unions from about 15 countries on 4 continents, and it periodically holds international congresses, each time in a different country. The IWA was formed in 1922, and initially contained millions of members. Although nearly all of its member unions were forced underground or into exile during World War II, it has since regenerated and continues to meet.

Networks not borders

As nation-states evolved in Europe over several hundred years, governments worked hard to fabricate a sense of community on the basis of shared language, shared culture, and shared history, all of which were conflated with shared government. This fictive community serves to foster identification with and thus allegiance to the central authorities, to obscure the conflict of interests between lower classes and the elite by framing them as being on the same team, and to confuse the good fortune or glory of the rulers with a good fortune shared by all; it also makes it easier for poor people in one country to kill poor people in another country by creating psychological distance between them.

On inspection, this notion that nation-states are based on shared culture and history is a fraud. For example, Spain created itself by expelling the Moors and the Jews. Even apart from this, without the central gravity produced by the state, Spain would not exist. There isn’t a single Spanish language, but at least five: Catalan, Euskera, Gallego, Castillian, and the dialect of Arabic developed in Morocco and Andalucia. If any of these languages were subject to careful scrutiny, more fractures would appear. The Valencians might say, not without reason, that their language is not the same as Catalan, but if you put the seat of government in Barcelona you would get the same suppression of Valenciano that the Spanish government employed against Catalan.

Without the enforced homogenization of nation-stations, there would be even more variety, as languages and cultures evolve and blend with each other. Borders hinder this cultural diffusion, and thus promote conflict by formalizing similarities and differences. Borders don’t protect people; they are a means by which governments protect their assets, which include us. When the borders shift in a war, the victorious state has advanced, staking its claim to new territory, new resources, and new subjects. We are plunder — potential cannon fodder, taxpayers, and laborers — and borders are the walls of our prison.

Even without borders, there may occasionally be clear differences in the ways societies organize — for example, one may attempt to conquer a neighbor or maintain the oppression of women. But decentralized, borderless societies can still defend themselves from aggression. A community with a clear sense of its autonomy does not need to see an invader cross an imaginary line in order to notice aggression. People fighting for their freedom and their own homes fight fiercely and are capable of organizing spontaneously. If there were no governments to fund military complexes, those fighting defensive campaigns would usually enjoy the advantage, so it wouldn’t pay to go on the offensive. When European states conquered the rest of the world, they enjoyed certain decisive advantages, including unprecedented population density and technologies their victims had never seen before. These advantages existed at a certain historical moment, and they are no longer pertinent. Communication is now global, population density and resistance to disease are more evenly distributed, and the popular weapons necessary for waging effective defensive warfare against the most technologically advanced of armies — assault rifles and explosives — are available in most parts of the world and can be manufactured at home. In a future without government, aggressive societies would be disadvantaged.

Anarchists are breaking down borders today by creating worldwide networks, undermining nationalism, and fighting in solidarity with immigrants who are upsetting the homogeneity of nation-states. People on the borders can help abolish them by aiding illegal border crossings or supporting people who cross illegally, learning the language spoken on the other side, and building communities that span the border. People farther inland can assist by ending their allegiance to centralized, homogenized culture and developing local culture, by welcoming migrants into their communities, and by spreading awareness and acting in solidarity with struggles in other parts of the world.

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