Introduction

Anarcho-Curious? or, Anarchist Amnesia

Nathan Schneider

The first evening of a solidarity bus tour in the West Bank, I listened as a contingent of college students from around the United States made an excellent discovery: they were all, at least kind of, anarchists. As they sat on stuffed chairs in the lobby of a lonely hotel near the refugee camp in war-ravaged Jenin, they probed one another’s political tendencies, which were reflected in their ways of dressing and their most recent tattoos. All of this, along with stories of past trauma, made their way out into the light over the course of our ten-day trip.

“I think I would call myself an anarchist,” one admitted.

Then another jumped into the space this created: “Yeah, totally.”

Basic agreement about various ideologies and idioms ensued—ableism, gender queerness, Zapatistas, black blocs, borders. The students took their near unison as an almost incalculable coincidence, though it was no such thing.

This was the fall of 2012, just after the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. A new generation of radicals had experienced a moment in the limelight and a sense of possibility—and had little clear idea about what to do next. They had participated in an uprising that aspired to organize horizontally, that refused to address its demands to the proper authority, and that, like other concurrent movements around the world, prided itself on the absence of particular leaders. One couldn’t call the Occupy movement an anarchist phenomenon per se; though some of its originators were self-conscious and articulate anarchists, most who took part wouldn’t describe their objectives that way. Still, the mode of being that Occupy swept so many people into with its temporary autonomous zones in public squares nevertheless left them feeling, as it was sometimes said, anarcho-curious.

The generation most activated by Occupy is one for which the Cold War means everything and nothing. We came to consciousness in a world where communism was a doomed proposition from the get-go, vanquished by our Reagan-esque grandfathers and manifestly genocidal to boot. Capitalism won fair and square: market forces work. A vaguer kind of socialism, such as what furnished the functional train systems that carried us on backpacking trips across Europe, still held some appeal. Yet the word “socialism” has been so thoroughly tarnished in the hegemonic sound bites of Fox News as to be obviously unusable politically. It’s also the word Fox associates with Barack Obama, whom this generation’s door-knocking helped elect but whose administration strengthened the corporate oligarchy, waged unaccountable robot wars, and imprisoned migrant workers and heroic whistleblowers at record rates. So much for “socialism.”

Anarchism, then, is a corner backed into rather than a conscious choice—an apophatic last resort, and a fruitful one. It permits being political outside the red-and-blue confines of what is normally referred to as “politics” in the United States, without being doomed to a major party’s inevitable betrayal. We can affirm the values we’ve learned on the Internet—transparency, crowd-sourcing, freedom to, freedom from. We can be ourselves.

Anarchy is the political blank slate of the early twenty-first century. It is shorthand for an eternal now, for a chance to restart the clock. Nowhere is this more evident than in the anarchic online collective Anonymous, whose only qualification for membership is having effaced one’s identity, history, origins, and responsibility.

This anarchist amnesia that has overtaken radical politics in the United States is a reflection of the amnesia in U.S. politics generally. With the exception of a few shared mythologies about our founding slaveholders and our most murderous wars, we like to imagine that everything we do is being done for the very first time. Such amnesia can be useful, because it lends a sensation of pioneering vitality to our undertakings that the rest of the history-heavy world seems to envy. But it also condemns us to forever reinvent the wheel. And this means missing out on what makes anarchism worth taking seriously in the end: the prospect of learning, over the course of generations, how to build a well-organized and free society from the ground up.

Our capacity to forget is astonishing. In 1999, a horizontal “spokes council” organized the protests that helped shut down the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Just over a decade later, a critical mass of Occupy Wall Street participants considered such a decision-making structure an illegitimate and intolerably reformist innovation.

Despite whatever extent to which we have ourselves to blame for our amnesia, however, it also has been imposed on us through repression against the threat anarchism was once perceived to pose. Remember that an American president was killed by an anarchist, and another anarchist assassination set off World War I. There are still unmarked gashes on buildings along Wall Street left over from anarchist bombs. More usefully, and more dangerously, anarchists used to travel across the country teaching industrial workers how to organize themselves and demand a fair share from their robber-baron bosses. Thus, the official questionnaire at Ellis Island sought to single out anarchists coming from Europe. Thus, Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were martyred in 1927, and roving grand juries imprison anarchists without charge today. Thus, we see liberal sleights of hand such as the one described in chapter 3, by which the anarchist popular revolution under way during the Spanish Civil War was deftly erased from history.

Anarchism’s slate is really anything but blank. In this book Noam Chomsky plays the role of an ambassador for the kind of anarchism that we’re supposed to have forgotten—that has a history and knows it, that has already shown another kind of world to be possible. He first encountered anarchism as a child in New York, before World War II succeeded in making capitalist-against-communist Manicheism the unquestioned civil religion of the United States. He could find not just Marx but also Bakunin in the book stalls. He witnessed a capitalist class save itself from Depression-era ruin only by creating a social safety net and tolerating unions. The Zionism he was exposed to was a call to agrarian collectivism, not to military occupation.

The principle with which Chomsky describes his own anarchist leanings draws a common thread from early modern libertarian theorists like Godwin and Proudhon to the assassins of the early 1900s and the instincts of Anonymous today: power that isn’t really justified by the will of the governed should be dismantled. More to the point, it should be refashioned from below. Without greedy elites maintaining their privilege with propaganda and force, workers might own and govern their workplaces, and communities might provide for the basic needs of everyone. Not all anarchist tactics are equally ethical or effective, but they do more or less arise from this common hope.

Into old age, Chomsky carries his anarchism with uncommon humaneness, without the need to put it on display as a black-masked caricature of itself. A lifetime of radical ideas and busy activism is enough of a credential. He sees no contradiction between holding anarchist ideals and pursuing certain reforms through the state when there’s a chance for a more free, more just society in the short term; such humility is a necessary antidote to the self-defeating purism of many anarchists today. He represents a time when anarchists were truly fearsome—less because they were willing to put a brick through a Starbucks window than because they had figured out how to organize themselves in a functional, egalitarian, and sufficiently productive society.

This side of anarchism was the cause of George Orwell’s revelry upon arriving in Barcelona to join the war against Franco. It’s a moment he records in Homage to Catalonia, a book you’ll find quoted several times in the pages that follow; already farms, factories, utilities, and militias were being run by workers along anarcho-socialist lines. Orwell recalls:

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life—snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.—had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. Of course such a state of affairs could not last. It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole surface of the earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word “comrade” stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality.

With a few proper nouns adjusted, much the same statement could have come from a witness to the Occupy movement, though the awe would be less well deserved. Orwell saw anarchy overtake a whole city along with large swaths of countryside, rather than the square block or less of a typical Occupy encampment. That these far smaller utopias managed to convey the same sense of knock-you-down newness, of soul-conquering significance, is probably because of historical amnesia again: most people had never learned about the bigger ones in school. They were astonished by the systematic violence used to eliminate the Occupy encampments because they hadn’t heard about how the Spanish anarchists and the Paris Commune were crushed with military force as well. Amnesia constrains ambition and inoculates against patience.

Still, developments are under way that contribute to anarchism’s legacy. Anarchists in this country now insist on grappling with challenges of sexual identity and ingrained oppression that mainstream society gingerly prefers not to recognize. They are at the forefront of movements to protect animal rights and the environment that future generations will be grateful for. As industrial agriculture becomes more and more poisoned by profit motives, anarchists are growing their own food. Anarchist hackers understand better than most of us the power of information and the lengths that those in power will go to control it; proof is in the years- and decades-long prison sentences now being doled out for online civil disobedience.

These mighty insights, along with so much else, risk being lost to amnesia if they’re not passed on in memory and habit, if they’re not treated as part of a legacy rather than as just passing reactions against the latest brand of crisis. At least in their various collectives and affinity groups, committed anarchists today tend to be a literate bunch who do know their history, even if others have forgotten.

A bit of historical consciousness suggests something else: there may be more anarcho-curiosity among us than we tend to realize. Among the supporting characters one finds in Peter Marshall’s Chomsky-endorsed study Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism are forefathers to those we call “libertarians” in the United States—which is to say, capitalists in favor of minimal government—including John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Herbert Spencer.

Chomsky refers to right-wing libertarianism as “an aberration” nearly unique to this country, a theory of “a world built on hatred” that “would self-destruct in three seconds.” Yet the vitality of this once- or twice-removed cousin of anarchism becomes evident with every election cycle, when libertarian candidate Ron Paul squeezes his way into the Republican debates thanks to the impressively determined and youthful “army” fighting for his “rEVOLution.” (The capitalized words spell “LOVE” backward.) This is anarchism with corporate funding and misplaced nostalgia, its solidarity cleaved off by the willful protagonists in Ayn Rand’s novels. Yet I’m more optimistic than I’m often told I should be about the prospects for and longings of this bloc and of the chances for reuniting it with a libertarianism more worth having.

In the early days and weeks of Occupy Wall Street, libertarian foot soldiers were out in force. They too had a bone to pick with a government-slash-empire that acts like a subsidiary of the big banks, and they kept trying to draw Occupiers into their sieges of the Federal Reserve building a block from occupied Zuccotti Park. But over time they withdrew from the encampments, probably after having had enough of the disorderliness and the leftist identity politics. They retreated to tabling stations a block or two away and then disappeared from the movement just about entirely.

The scenario could have played out differently. If it had, what might these right and left libertarianisms—equally amnesiac about their common origins—learn from one another?

The anarcho-curious left might rediscover that there is more to a functional resistance movement than youthful rebellion. Its members might, for instance, study working examples of the mutual aid they long for—education, material support, free day care—in churches and megachurches across the country, which form both the social life and the power base of the right. Independent of the state, these citadels put into practice something anarchists have been saying all along: no form of politics is worth our time until it helps struggling people get what they need, sustainably and reliably. All the better if you can do so without patriarchy and fundamentalism.

Meanwhile, the libertarian right might find the wherewithal to detach from its overly rosy view of the Constitution, from its more or less subtle racism against nonwhites and immigrants, and from its 1-percenter sponsors. It might raise tougher questions about whether “competition” is really the most liberating response to long-standing injustices along lines of gender, race, and circumstance. What would these young, energetic libertarians think if they encountered an egalitarian, democratic anarchism in the form of a robust political philosophy and practice? For too many people, Ayn Rand is as close to it as they are ever exposed to, and she’s not very close at all.

Anarchism deserves better than to be a mere curiosity, or a blank slate, or an overlapping consensus among newly minted radicals who have trouble agreeing on anything else. It is better than that. Both the anarcho-curiosity awakened by Occupy and the flourishing of right-wing libertarianism are signs that anarchism is overdue for recognition as a serious intellectual tradition and a real possibility. Noam Chomsky has been treating it that way throughout his career, and more of us should follow suit.