It Works When We Make It Work

The many people who conspired to commit these rebel stories to paper and get them into your hands have been thoughtful enough to provide you with one parting example of anarchy: the book itself. Imagine the decentralized network, the harmonious chaos, the confluence of liberated desires, that made it possible. With passion and determination millions of people breathed life into the stories we present, and many of them struggled even past the point of certain defeat in the hopes their utopias might inspire future generations. Hundreds of other people documented these worlds and kept them alive in our minds. A dozen more came together to edit, design, and illustrate the book, and even more collaborated with proofreading, printing, and distributing it. We have no boss, nor are we getting paid to do this. In fact, the book is priced at cost and our goal in distributing it is not to make money, but to share it with you.

Publishing is an enterprise we were supposed to leave to the professionals, and books were something we were supposed to buy and consume, not to make ourselves. But we forged ourselves the permission slip to pursue this project, and we hope to show that you can too. It can be tempting to present such ambitious projects as magically final products, leaving the reader to guess how we did it and reveling in the illusion ourselves; however sometimes it’s better to let an inopportune gust of wind blow in, sweep up the curtains, and reveal the machinations backstage. This book, then, proves to be no different from all the other examples illuminated herein, in that its creation was also a matter of constructive conflict. The collection of people immediately responsible for publishing it is not a homogeneous circle, but rather includes editorial groups with distinct modes of operation, and a primary author for whom writing is an individual activity. Because of differering needs and opinions, some people could not see this project through to its end, but as anarchists they were free to leave the group when it was in their interests, and they had already affected the manuscript in good ways. Meanwhile, thanks to a flexibility of organization, the project could go forward.

As the individualist in this group, I learned and developed in ways I would not have had I been working in an authoritarian group. With a traditional publisher, I would be forced to concede whenever a disagreement arose, not because I had been convinced of their point of view but because they controlled more resources and could determine whether the book would make it to print or not. But with our horizontal arrangement, I could receive criticism that I knew was intended to develop the book to its outermost potential, rather than just to make it sell better in a dumbed-down market.

Granted, publishing a book is not the most amazing achievement, and the wee paper thing certainly isn’t about to storm the Winter Palace, feisty as it is, but one of our most basic points is that anarchy is much more commonplace than we’ve been led to believe. And hell, if we can make it work, so can you.

Also like the other stories we’ve told here, the story of our storytelling contains its own weaknesses. We’d like to be the first to point them out. Unavoidably, a couple things are missing. One is a matter of realism. While making this book we’ve tried not to romanticize the examples, though clearly these pages do not provide the space for a full analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each cited revolution or social experiment. However we wanted to give some indication of the abundance of complexities and difficulties lurking beneath the surface of every example of anarchy. But if the book is at all successful, if you readers do not simply say, Oh, that’s nice, anarchy is possible, and then go back to your lives, but instead you actually arm yourselves with this knowledge to plunge into the creation of an anarchist world, you will quickly discover for yourselves how difficult it is.

The truth is, sometimes anarchy doesn’t work. Sometimes people don’t learn how to cooperate, or a certain group never finds a way to share responsibilities, or infighting leaves an entire movement flatfooted and unable to survive the grave pressures of the world around it. Even some of the examples described in this book eventually fell apart due to their own internal failings. In other cases a liberated community will be brutally repressed, a squatted social center creating a bubble of freedom from state and capital will be kicked out by the landlord, or the state will find some excuse to lock you up for participating in the struggle to create a new world.

Many people who fought for anarchy ended up dead and defeated, or simply demoralized. And their sacrifices will not be celebrated unless we write that history ourselves, to learn from their failures and be inspired by what they won.

Another failing of this book is that we have not been able to romanticize these examples enough. I’m afraid our meekly attempted objectivity omits how inspiring it feels to put anarchy into practice, despite all the difficulties. The stories here are real, on a level deeper than the footnotes, the chronicle of dates and names, can express. Some of these stories I have lived myself, and they are wrapped up in the very writing of the book. The tedious satisfaction of organizing infoshops and learning how to use consensus, in defiance of the stifling psychological terrain of the United States, was my inspiration for starting a book about what an anarchist world would actually look like. Though I still haven’t finished that project, it led me to research what anarchy already had looked like. On a park bench in Berlin, taking a break from studying the autonomous movement of that city, I sketched an outline for this new book, and a couple weeks later, in Christiania, I saw how an entire neighborhood living in anarchy seems perfectly ordinary.

It occurred to me that I might encounter many more living histories if I looked. Over the next year I went to a seventy-five-year-old anarchist camp in the Netherlands, and waded into a continuity of struggle in which the past does not imprison the present, but fertilizes it. I stood in provincial Ukrainian towns that once overthrew authority and tried to imagine how they looked, gardened in an anarchist village in the mountains of Italy and felt down to my very bones what the abolition of work means. As I traveled I corresponded with one of my best friends as he went off to Oaxaca for six months and participated in the rebellion there.

Appropriately enough, I finished my writing in a squat in Barcelona, where I was stuck awaiting trial and threatened with prison time after a police frame-up. The park down the street used to be the city jail, but the anarchists tore it down in 1936. In 2007 our social center took it over in protest of our impending eviction, setting up a free store, putting out a selection of books from our library, telling stories to the children. Unexpectedly illegalized, I found my survival tied up with the network of liberated spaces throughout the city, that housed and nourished me. And these spaces, in turn, depended on all of us fighting to create and defend them.

The same is true of all the other histories we’ve seen: none of them owe their existence to spectators. These stories show that anarchy can work. But we have to build it ourselves. The courage and confidence we need to do this cannot be found in any book. They already belong to us. We only have to claim them.

May these stories jump off their pages and into your hearts, and find new life.

Peter Gelderloos

Barcelona, December 2008