Definitions, Pluralism, Anarchy

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Constructing Anarchisms: Definitions, Pluralism, Anarchy

More Notes for a Preface

The Difficulty of Defining Terms

One of the ideas driving Constructing Anarchisms has been the notion that “anarchy” and “anarchism” mark problems that it is necessary to return to again and again, that “becoming an anarchist” is an ongoing and arguably interminable project. And, while that idea may not be exactly popular in anarchist circles, it is undoubtedly connected to the widely-shared intuition that we must allow anarchist theory and practice to retain some significant degree of pluralism. We certainly expect anarchy to manifest itself in a variety of ways, to be amenable to discussion in a variety of vocabularies, to be approachable from a variety of contexts, etc.—and we seem to share a sense that denying some similarly protean qualities to anarchist theory and practice would be some kind of fundamental betrayal of our anarchic ideals. Critiques of “absolutism”—specifically connecting anarchism and anti-absolutism—are surprisingly common lately in online debate. 

So far, so good… We might be led to believe that anarchists are well on our way to confronting the “blind men and the elephant” character of our engagement with anarchy and its practical manifestations. Surely, some widespread outbreak of ideological modesty and an embrace of development through synthesis are just around the corner…

The problem, of course, is that our attachment to pluralism, like our attachment to anarchy, tends to remain largely a matter of intuitions, applied “on the fly” and often rather opportunistically. So, for example, there may be opposition to “absolutism” when it is a question of distinguishing “anarchy” and “democracy,” because “words mean different things to different people,” from those who would wave off the idea of “anarchist” capitalism or nationalism with no hesitation at all. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that, in their treatment of basic concepts and beliefs, anarchists share a tendency to waver between dogmatism and dispersion, with consequences for both individual and collective practice that are all too predictable.

The consolation for anarchists is that the difficulties that lead to this sort of wavering are almost certainly structural, arising from a combination of the conceptual challenges posed by taking anarchy as an ideal and various tensions imposed on modern anarchisms by the specific historical development of anarchist ideas and movements. This is another of the ideas driving my recent projects—one that might eventually be explored in real detail through Our Lost Continent and the Journey Back. The problem is that we can come to a very clear sense of how our shared history brought us to the particular place we occupy without necessarily improving our situation a great deal. This has been one of the lessons of “Constructing an Anarchism,” where it became abundantly clear that learning this particular lesson from history was going to be difficult for many not already immersed in historical questions, and then again of “Margins and Problems,” where I found that my own critical and interpretive apparatus was simply not quite up to the task of tracing potential anarchisms through periods I know pretty well.

I interrupted “Margins and Problems” in order to determine what, if anything, I could do to “fix” some key terms—particularly “anarchy” and “anarchism”—in ways that rendered them consistently applicable across various periods of history, but avoided ideological dogmatism, which would be as deadly to the projects I have in mind as a “pluralism” that amounts to pure dispersion of meaning. I was not initially all that hopeful, but was pleasantly surprised to find that the “general formula” for anarchism and the exploratory typology of anarchisms came together just as soon as I sat down to start the work, with a serviceable outline for what was becoming a monograph on basic anarchist theory not far behind.

There are, of course, few easier ways to complicate a piece of writing than to establish a clear outline for it—as I have been reminded in recent weeks. But I have few complaints about the kinds of clarifications that have emerged from starting to put flesh on that skeleton.

Central to the argument I have been elaborating about the historical development of anarchist ideas and practices is a distinction between two periods: an era of anarchists without anarchism (from 1840 into the mid-1870s) and then an era during which anarchisms have proliferated. “Margins and Problems” added some consideration of an earlier period, during which anarchistic ideas emerged, but without the specific vocabulary provided by Proudhon, but did so in the context of a significantly different treatment of “anarchism.” Where “Our Lost Continent and the Journey Back” reserves the term “anarchism” for the instances when anarchists explicitly adopted it, highlighting those decades when, in the midst of an explosion of -isms, they did not, “Margins and Problems” dealt with the question of “potential anarchisms” and anarchism avant la lettre, asking questions about what more or less anarchistic expressions from those early decades might be recognized as a form of anarchism by the standards of the present. I was clear, at least in my own mind, about the kind of work that this idea of recognition might do more generally, about how the exercise of attempting to “recognize our own” in the historical sources might perhaps serve as practice for a different approach to that same problem in our interactions within the anarchist milieus—but I was rather painfully aware that, however useful the intuition I was exploring might prove to be, it was still more an intuition than any sort of clearly shareable tool or method.

I had, by that time, introduced most of the elements that would lead me from the impasse I was facing in “Margins and Problems” to the present analysis, even if their real utility was not yet clear to me. Because “Constructing an Anarchism” was supposed to be an example of “making anarchism one’s own,” I made a point of pursuing a very different strategy than I have in the more historical work, often going to fairly extreme lengths to try to attach fresh concepts to rather tired, potentially compromised keywords. For example, when defining “tradition,” a term I expected to have negative connotations for much of my audience, I chose this formulation:

The anarchist tradition is, in its actual form, simply the ensemble of all that anarchists are saying about anarchism or anarchist ideas in any given moment, together with whatever share of historical anarchist utterances remain active in some sense in anarchist discourse. It is not a sum or resultant. We cannot count on it to “add up” in any very consistent sense. Indeed, we expect that it would exhibit considerable conflict and inconsistency, assuming we could somehow make all of its elements simultaneously present to consciousness. It is what we might call, following Proudhon, a work of collective reason. As part of what that means is that we don’t really expect to find all of it it in any one head.

There is undoubtedly still some clumsiness in the formulation, but the point was to draw the discussion away from consistently contentious debates about “the anarchist tradition” and its greater or lesser degree of internal diversity—debates that almost inevitably run aground on the fact that tradition, while real, is always difficult to pin down in its particulars—in order to confront something vague but unavoidable:

Tradition, then, is something given as soon as we make the attempt to “be an anarchist.” We can make choices about how we will think about anarchist tradition, but we can hardly avoid thinking about it, even if it is just to attempt to somehow strike out on our own and “be anarchists” in some entirely novel way. And even then we might be forced to recognize that our attempt to break free of a given conception of anarchist tradition simply amounts, from a less individual perspective, to our contribution to the collective work from which tradition arises. The next would-be anarchist to come along would confront an anarchist tradition — in this very general sense — shaped by our rebellion, but would face the confrontation nonetheless.

In that context, however, I was still focused on the tension of anarchy vs. anarchism, the critique of ideology, Proudhon’s dismissal of isms as “not worth a pair of boots,” etc. In “Halfway to Anarchism” I proposed thinking of anarchism in the most general sense as a sort of “collective einzige,” which might be encountered on a more or less equal basis in our attempts to become anarchists, but, if I’m honest, I have to acknowledge that through most of that work the collective manifestations of anarchism have remained primarily spaces of conflict, compromise and failure.

That particular treatment of “tradition” was an attempt to account for the necessarily social nature of “becoming an anarchist and establishing the general context or environment within which the work of constructing a more specific formulation of anarchist ideas—”an anarchism of our own”—takes place. Anarchist tradition was contrasted with the anarchist past, with the emphasis on the fact that elements of that past could be “activated” in our individual interventions, with a chance of then becoming part of the tradition moving forward. Early in the project, it seemed to make sense to place individual anarchists, engaged in the practice of constructing individual anarchisms, between the potential of the anarchist past and the more or less vague constraints of anarchist tradition.

It still makes sense, but, in the context of my present exploration of formulas and typologies, a slightly different formulation seems to be called for. At this point, rather than positing this practice of “making our own anarchisms” as something that could be done, I’m happy to claim that it is quite simply one of the things that anarchists have always done—and then to situate these most personal sorts of anarchism among the various types. However, in place of “anarchist tradition,” as a mark of the anarchic “ensemble” of anarchisms presently recognizable as such, it seems more useful to propose what we might call anarchism-in-general, which we can approach with the same “general formula” as more individual forms.

The question then becomes—to return to the opening discussion of “pluralism”—how the recognition of an “anarchic ensemble” alongside the more obviously individual constructions of anarchism might facilitate the work of comparison, clarification and synthesis. To at least start to address that question, I want to return to the “general formula”

Anarchism = (((an + arche)ist)ism)

and talk a bit more about its terms.

Anarchy

We’re looking for ways to “fix” the terms of analysis enough so that we are not constantly struggling with various kinds of semantic noise and slippage, while still respecting what is fundamentally anarchic and ungovernable in both the concepts and the bodies of theory and practice we are hoping to examine. In that context, anarchy is the term that needs to be defined with the greatest care.

I want to keep the present text rather light on historical references, but will rely on a fairly small number of moments in the anarchist literature that seem to provide particular useful summaries or metaphors. Proudhon’s declaration that he was an anarchist “in the full force of the term,” together with his later affirmation of anarchy “in all of its senses,” seems like a good place to start, from the perspective of pluralism, providing us with a particularly anarchic notion of anarchy to set at the center of our analysis. And then it becomes a question of exploring the various senses of the term. The opening of William B. Greene’s “The Blazing Star” presents us with an ideal that recedes as we chase it—and it’s not hard to imagine the progress of our anarchic project as passing through stages marked by new demands, as we move from the combat against formal authority to struggles against its customary forms, before turning to the kinds of social transformation that will be necessary to minimize “authority-effects” emerging from material conditions. Joseph Déjacque’s “bilge-rat,” from the early pages of  The Humanisphere, provides a provocative metaphor for the anarchist project as both escape from the archic status quo, but through a radical, potentially catastrophic opening to an inrushing alternative. And then the remainder of that work, with its anarchist détournement of elements from Charles Fourier, also takes us back to Proudhon’s anarchic “ideal republic,” where everyone does what they wish, and only what they wish. We could, of course, multiply the senses of anarchy, drawing on visions of Cossack invasions, free markets, poisonous pies, creative nothings, etc., but it isn’t clear how far beyond “the full force of the term” any of that takes us.

We “fix” anarchy as a concept precisely by emphasizing its extremity and plurality. By doing so, we increase the range of anarchisms that we can recognize, but we also emphasize that all of these anarchisms represent similarly structured, comparable, but partial expressions of the ideal of anarchy.

Anarchisms

According to the proposed formula, each specific anarchism is the work of anarchists attempting to produce instances of anarchy in the world. As such, we should expect our plural anarchisms to differ in a wide variety of ways, reflect a variety of senses of anarchy, a variety of contexts and a variety of problems to be solved. And, provided they reflect the basic dynamic expressed by our formula, our enthusiasm for the resulting plurality of projects should arguably be tempered only by questions about how well those specific contexts and problems have been addressed. We can acknowledge the multiple, strong demands made by the central ideal of anarchy and still recognize that the answers to those demands may not “add up” to anything like a single ideological program. If, on the other hand, the anarchy of our anarchisms seems to emerge from uncertainty about the shared ideal, from the substitution of some other guiding concept for anarchy “in the full force of the term,” then perhaps all we can say with a great deal of certainty is that the “anarchisms” in question are ultimately incommensurable—and we may not even be able to have a good fight about them. Rather than a plurality of anarchisms, we have some form of dispersion, obscured by shared terms.

So we “fix” anarchisms as a concept by reaffirming the concept of anarchy, precisely in that strong sense, and then by noting that we expect each individual anarchism constructed to be a clear-but-partial expression of anarchy in such specific set of circumstances.

One of the consequences of treating anarchisms as a plural category, composed of partial expressions of anarchy, is to step away from the kind of familiar perspective that opposes anarchy and anarchism, however dialectically and productively, as if the ideal and the actual always had to be in conflict. There seems to be little doubt that many anarchists feel a tension—or various tensions—between their own theories and practices. And it may not be a mistake to say that some of the resulting discomfort arises from a sense that our anarchisms suffer from a bit too much anarchy—or from too little pluralism—or some similar complaint. There are, of course, reasons associated with anarchism’s history why we might expect that to be the case, reasons for expecting dialectical dynamics, contradictions, antinomies and the like to feature in our theory and practice. But there are also, I think, reasons to suspect that the extent to which they should encourage us to expect fundamental conflicts, like the one we at times assume between anarchy and anarchism, might be less than some early anarchist writings suggest.

There is a long aside that would be possible here, addressing Fourier’s serial analysis, Proudhon’s epistemology, etc., some of which probably belongs in one of the later chapters of this work. At this point, however, it just seems useful to remind ourselves that, if we have embraced a rather anarchic notion of anarchy and seem prepared to do something similar with the concept of anarchism-in-general, it is alongside and in addition to other analyses. Talking about the Greek root arche, Stephen Pearl Andrews noted that it “curiously combines, in a subtle unity of meaning” a number or apparently quite different senses—and it is through the understanding of similarly curious combinations and similarly subtle unities that we are likely to make sense of “anarchy in all of its senses.” The reason we would both to try is because we already have in both anarchy as a concept and anarchic expression as a phenomenon.

We might also take an additional moment to consider how few concepts are likely to confront us with such an enticing example of unity-in-diversity. More often than not, when anarchists find themselves talking about the different meanings of important keywords, it is to acknowledge that we may simply be speaking at cross-purposes—whether or not that recognition leads us to make the clarifications presumably called for. It probably makes a lot more sense to be on particularly our guard against missteps as we play anarchic games with the language and concepts associated with anarchy, rather than, say, imagining that anything good is likely to come from similar handling of concepts like authority, power, etc.

Anarchism-in-general

The formula and taxonomy I’m working on were initially conceived as tools to avoid the confusions associated with a certain kind of anarchism-without-clarification. It was only once the analysis was well underway that I began to consider what might be done by addressing the most general manifestations of the proposed formula. My first thought was that, with fairly minor modifications, the conception of anarchist tradition I had proposed for “Constructing an Anarchism” would serve as a kind of anarchism-in-general, corresponding as it does to the formula in a very general sense. And it struck me that it is really the most general sort of anarchism that confronts us most dauntingly as we are attempting to become an anarchist, whether we are beginners trying to confront or embrace it all at once or whether we are old-timers forced to deal with how much anarchism there is out there that is so clearly not “our own.”

Having begun to incorporate it into the larger project, I was also struck by the ways in which the challenges posed by this anarchism-in-general were very similar to those posed by the concept of anarchy. “Profusion and uncertainty” is the formula I have used in other writings to gesture at the ways that anarchy provides us with both too much and too little, all at the same time. Anarchism-in-general seems to frustrate our needs and expectation in similar ways.

Of course, none of this was exactly new—no matter how differently it all struck me in the new context. I had already proposed thinking of anarchism-in-general (avant la letter, if only be a month or three) as a work of collective force, as a “collective einzige” that might be encountered as something like an equal by individual anarchists, as a kind of “camarade,” etc., along with everything proposed in the discussion of anarchist tradition. Nor have I been unaware that part of what anarchists respond negatively to when they talk about the diversity of positions among anarchists seems to be the element of anarchy in it all. But I have been struck over the last few days by a strong sense, which certainly has been new to me, that, while all of our individual and specific anarchisms have to be treated as partial and local adaptations of the anarchist ideal, anarchism-in-general appears to be something much more like a direct manifestation of at least the idea of anarchy. And that has made me wonder—and, so far, to ponder the question without any very clear conclusions—what it would take for anarchism-in-general to be recognized among anarchists as a space of solidarity, rather than primarily a space of distinction and conflict—but in a real, active sense, not just with a kind of “different strokes for different folks” kind of indifference, punctuated by bouts of sudden certainty about when lines have been crossed.

It’s really the “anarchism without adjectives” problem, I suppose, on a slightly different terrain. Although that label has been around for almost as long as “anarchism” itself, there still don’t seem to be any very clear guidelines for recognizing the unmodified anarchism in question—with the result that the label seems to be shared by some of those most resolutely committed to the pursuit of anarchy, some of the most shameless authoritarian entryists and some other folks who aren’t all that sure what they believe. The tendency has been largely a response to conceptions of anarchism that do not consider individual projects as necessarily partial and local, so a kind of general tolerance has been enough to mark the ideological space, but not to generate much in the way of specifically adjectiveless anarchist theory or practice. Similar, “anarchist synthesis” has primarily been a position within a fairly narrow debate about organizing anarchist federations, despite the interesting general account of anarchist development Voline gave us way back in 1924.

At this relatively early stage, I think I have to simply acknowledge that the present work will probably clear a space for recognizing some kind of adjectiveless anarchism, alongside various much more narrowly defined varieties. But, just as synthesis has shifted, in the context of recent work, from an organizational option for anarchist groupings to a way of talking about the general development of anarchism, I expect that anarchism-in-general, when treated as an anarchism without adjectives, will also assume a more general role, rather than marking a particular tendency among others. (That approach may allow some clarification of phrases like Ricardo Mella’s “La anarquía no admite adjetivos,” which has perhaps been a bit misrepresented.)

Definitions, Pluralism, Anarchy

I am generally inclined to treat a lot of the haggling over definitions among anarchists as simply unnecessary and resulting from a failure to think particularly clearly about what definitions are relevant to specifically anarchist conversations. But, as the present work hopes to provide tools for clarification adequate for existing conditions, perhaps it makes sense to directly address the dynamic that emerges when the key concepts of anarchist theory are treated in the most pluralistic, anarchic manner.

The general formula proposed should still serve, very much as already presented, since all it really attempts to explain is a general relationship between terms. For any definition of arche, it is possible to posit an anarchy, to then recognize an anarchist in the individual who embraces it and finally to recognize as anarchism the various theoretical and practical manifestations of that embrace and internalization of the guiding ideal. Provided the conception of arche retains those “curious combinations” and “subtle unities of meaning,” we can expect that anarchy will be embraced “in the full force of the term” and our discussions of anarchists and anarchisms ought to be broadly shareable and applicable to a wide variety of practical projects—without any great effort, I think, to get various factions “on the same page” in any sense except to unite them in a kind of general anarchist extremism.

But we know that some of the enthusiasm for “pluralism” arises precisely from a rejection of the stronger senses of anarchy. So one of questions we will probably have to address is what relation the notion that “words mean different things to different people” has with the kind of anarchy of meaning that seems to exist among the “extremists.”

There are 54 Comments

I'm only peripherally aware of this ongoing series so apologies for joining a conversation part way through only half aware of the larger context. Here are some thoughts in response to the piece though.

1. In the idea of an anarchism without adjectives the only core of anarchism that I could identify would be this notion of anti-state and anti-capitalism. I believe this dual idea is also extendable to opposition to civilization as a worm and as an octopus to use perlmans terms as references to this idea of the state and capital outside of their specific contemporary meaning for a trans-historical one. I do think however that these two understandings, represented as a spectrum of thought and not a binary, represent the difficulty of having a core to anarchism.

2. With yhe idea of where the line is drawn I have especially begun to find this interesting. Mentioned is the quarantining of anarcho-capitalists and national-anarchists from anarchism amd anarchist spaces (such as this one). Often it is is cited because there is not an adherence to this first point, a aim of being both anti-state and anti-capital. In my experience however the drawing of this line seems quite short sited when one begins to question the ways in which left-anarchists (to the extent such a large label exists) could be said to also fall on the other side of this line with the capitalists and nationalists.

3. In a way I habe found myself with both an anarchy that has become extremely insular and hyper specific to my self to the extent that I now reject the label of anarchist but I have also found my idea of anarchism to become extremely encapsulatingnot just extending to anarcho-capitalists and national-anarchists but also to seeing the similarities between Anarchist politics and Fascist politics (as well as everything in between).

4. Because of this plurality it is very difficult for me to draw a line anywhere between friends (anarchists) and enemies (fascists) since the separation is not all that clear to me. I see anarchists who in word and/or in practice contribute to that which I find oppressive (to the extent that word has any meaning) and see fascists who also cause disruptions in the system.

4. I do not mean to decry all who contribute to oppressive systems (though I would be lying if I did not have my own anger even towards my own complacency), nor privelege the act of disruption (often, if not always, this act of disruption is also an act of recuperation). Instead I hope to muddy the waters, and to remove this barrier of Anarchist (good) not-anarchist (bad).

5. Allowing anarchists to be not-good, or even moving beyond this conception of anarchy to understand the wide range of ways people interact with the state an capital (both disrupting it and reinforcing it) I think allows one to have an honest understanding/engagement with that around them. In what ways does the anarchism of anarchi capitalists actually conflict with your anarchism? In what ways might your engagement with that conception of anarchy then influence your understanding of market anarchists?

6. I still need to formulate and put into words my exact thoughts, and conclusions on this subject I've outlined a bit, but I think within it are (at least for) ramifications for these anarchist principles that are often less challenged then this anarchist conception. I think especially the idea of solidarity, which is often drawn around the word anarchism is especially precarious if not absent in this understanding.

"Instead I hope to muddy the waters"

What about that phrase, from all I wrote, stood out to you? How did that phrase make you feel? How does that phrase contextually the rest of what I said? Seriously do you have anything to add to the conversation at all?

a couple responses:

i would say that the baseline for anarchy is not simply anti-state and anti-capitalist. i would change anti-capitalist to anti-economic-systems, and add anti-religion (not necessarily spirituality). but really i would probably choose to frame it as anti-institutional systems. some might qualify that as anti-hierarchical-institutions, but i have yet to come across an institution that is not hierarchical.

you seem to place anarchy/anarchist in a completely moralist context, with all the "good/bad" crap. getting rid of moralism is one step towards eliminating the very questions around what is good or bad. every situation has its own context, actors, etc, and i would evaluate each based on how that context (and actors, etc) impacts my life and the other lives i care about.

i have mixed feelings about your seeming desire to remove the distinction between anarchist/not-anarchist. abstractly i like the idea of eliminating more labels. but when you talk about including fascists and capitalists in your general anarchistic vagueness, something just chaps my ass.

"but when you talk about including fascists and capitalists in your general anarchistic vagueness, something just chaps my ass."

Why? This is what I mean by one should evaluate why associating with anarchists who may advocate capitalism in practice but not word, yet are repulsed by anarchists who advocate the same thing but nane it capitalism. This is the anarchists good non-anarchists bad that I am talking about.

"you seem to place anarchy/anarchist in a completely moralist context, with all the "good/bad" crap."

Personally I don't see anarchism as a good or bad thing. As mentioned anarchists, like fascists, do cause disruptions to the institutions I find myself oppressed by, but so too fo they reinforce these institutions (as do fascists).

"i would say that the baseline for anarchy is not simply anti-state and anti-capitalist. i would change anti-capitalist to anti-economic-systems, and add anti-religion (not necessarily spirituality). but really i would probably choose to frame it as anti-institutional systems."

This may describe your anarchism but I think at this point this definition excludes most self identified anarchists. Which perhaps you are okay with being exclusionary but I'm more interested in a descriptive definition of anarchism rather then a prescriptive one. And this again comes back to the question does anarchism have some core of what it is, something that threads anarchism together, or is it simply just a word to describe what we find good (or to symbolize ones opposition to evil).

"This may describe your anarchism"

i don't describe anarchism. i describe the anarchic relations that i desire in my world. i am one that prefers anarchy to anarchism.

"I'm more interested in a descriptive definition of anarchism rather then a prescriptive one. "

leaving aside your insistence on the term anarchism, even you just said i was describing. why bring up prescriptive?

add to prev comment for clarity:

to me anarchy is a state of being, a way of relating. anarchism is... a political philosophy? an ideology? don't really know, don't really care.

Okay then yes you are talking about your own anarchy, this I a conversation about anarchism as a plurality.

Excluding self-described anarchists may or may not be a problem, depending on your perspective. I'm personally only concerned if the exclusion (or inclusion, for that matter) is determined in reference to some other central idea than anarchy—or if it takes forms that render that idea essentially meaningless. I exclude ideological capitalists and fascists summarily, since my focus is on some pretty robust notion of anarchy and some pretty thoroughgoing opposition to the fundamental logics and structures of the status quo, not just considerations about whether they cause disruptions to particular archic systems. In the case of capitalism, "creative destruction" is a pretty well-known principle of that system's development and the anarchist critique of merely disrupting particular governmental formations seems to be one of the few things we really share widely.

It arguably isn't very important, for various reasons, whether we attach "good" and "bad" labels to anarchism, provided we maintain enough clarity that we can say that anarchism is something distinct—at which point we can support it or its rival projects, on the basis of our own priorities.

What is your robust understanding of anarchy then? Who are and are not anarchists?

Pick a few major targets of anarchist opposition: formal governmental domination, systemic capitalist exploitation, the intimate hierarchies of the patriarchal family, etc. If the archy opposed by anarchy covers all three, then it isn't going to leave much of the status quo untouched. Or come at it more directly from the historical precedents: Proudhon thought his approach entailed anti-absolutism, opposition to everything with any pretense of fixity—and everybody in the anarchist milieus thinks they're more radical than Proudhon. If we're looking around for disruptions that seem to be meaningful to a really radical opposition, it seems likely we'll find that anarchists need to be more diligent, not that the considerably less radical disruptions of fascists or ideologues attached to a utopian version of capitalism are somehow worth confusing or conflating with anarchist disruption.

As tired as the reform vs. revolution division is in most contexts, it really isn't all that hard to draw distinctions between disruptions that hope to contribute to the elimination of existing systems and those that just hope to rearrange the roles a bit.

Okay then draw the distinctions then if it is so clear, because it is not clear to me.

You don't seem to have a great deal of interest in the distinction. You wandered into the comments on a post about making distinctions in order to argue for abandoning the distinction between anarchists and others with conflicting goals—and have pretty much stuck to that program.

Yes my point in the conversation is that these distinctions aren't clear, and I think this essay has taken the distinction as a given at least partially. And so I think clarifying this distinction is essential to a conversation on plurality. And since I do not take this distinction as a given I want to see how people draw this distinction in a way that is consistent.

So far, you have responded to every clarification by repeating the question. Why should anyone continue to engage with you?

I haven't seen you clarify anything in relation to a plural anarchy or anarchism but instead define your singular anarchy. So the question remains how does your anarchy relate to a plural anarchy/anarchism. Is your anarchy the one true anarchy all anarchists believe in? Or if not where is the line you can draw between anarchists and liberals and Fascists?

In the earlier version of this comment, you were trying to tell me what my article was about—but now it isn't clear if you even read it. My own position is that anarchy is plural "by nature," which is one of the reasons it becomes useful to compare anarchisms, but also that the word "anarchy" either designates a radical alternative to the basic logics of the status quo or it is probably best to have recourse to other words. But for those, apparently like you, who feel that distinguishing anarchy from government is somehow too great an imposition—that anarchy in this radical and inherently plural sense still ties you down too much—I have raised the possibility of an even greater dispersal of meanings, freed from all lexical authority. I just don't think that an anarchy that can easily be confused with fascism is of much use. Your mileage may vary...

Ah okay I did not realize you are the author, but yes that is a much different question. I did not think the article was starting from the point that anarchy is plural, but was instead trying to construct a pluralism of anarchism. In other words I thought the article was trying to uncover what about anarchy is plural, Is the commonality. But it seems you are stating the opposite, that anarchy is plural naturally and so there is no need to uncover the commonalities.

Personally for me it is not that anarchy can't be distinguished from the government, but that line is actually far too simplistic an understanding again the question of are ancaps anarchist? This line in the sand says yes. I think its funny you say an anarchism that is hard to distinguish from Fascism isn't useful since that is to a large extent what anti-civ anarchism is to most people outside of it. Thus the derogatory Eco-Fascism. But even beyond that ITS for example, an ex-anarchist group has drawn many lessons from the Islamic State.

"but when you talk about including fascists and capitalists in your general anarchistic vagueness, something just chaps my ass."

It's almost as if A_zed is a bad-faith actor here to muddy every single conversation and make anarchists look like complete idiots for engaging with his bait.

What do you think is bad faith about my response? What about my response do you disagree with that you think makes it "bait"?

Also I don't use he/him.

the truly weird part is why that would be a thing worth doing ... as if this little corner of the internet is a worthwhile target for sustained "disruption" of what was mostly just shitposting in the first place.

i watched this innuendo studios piece recently? person who runs that channel makes a compelling case for how these reactionary little troll shitheads develop this complex pathology around needing to spend half their waking life trying to "own" their perceived internet enemies because it's the only form of validation they ever experience.

fascinating stuff! a window in to just another sad little cyborg waste of the short time we spend on earth, "the terminally online" indeed. FFS GO OUTSIDE PPL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLYWHpgIoIw

I'm familiar with them. But I don't see the point in your comment. We are here for a conversation on this topic. At least it seems to me the point of this article is to spark a conversation. For some people this is the only place to have these conversations since there are not anarchists around them. I guess my understanding in relation to trolls though (and im unsure if this is directed toward me or the other person but the thing is to try and find the interesting ideas and questions within someone's response, irregardless of if it's "good faith" etc. I don't find anything interesting in trying to pycho analyze someone though.

Whooo would have thought there's disruptive trolls on an anarchist site preyed upon by all kind of authoritarian interests and agencies!?

Its much more helpful to elaborate on what you think is misleading or wrong or trolling about a statement then to just paint it with a broad stroke. What do you actually disagree with?

You can elaborate on why you, a stated non-anarchist whom prefers to identify as a Passive_Nihilist ;-) spends every waking hours on an anarchist website only being a contrarian to literally everything on the website except for your own alts. "It begs the question." "Irregardless." ;-) Why,,, brow? Why so much time trolling all the anarchist website with low-to-no moderation? Are you lonely? Did the pedo forums evict you? Elaborate.

I'm not a nihlist just as much as I'm not an anarchist. Personally I don't see how I'm being contrarian so you'd have to elaborate what you mean, instead I see myself as contributing to the conversation. That contribution may take the form of controversial opinions, such as my stance on pedophilia, or my views on Fascism, but I think it is hard to say those things are contrarian especially since they have a history. As for alts I only post under this name here, though I've also gone by Stinky and Michel Foucault.

In regards to trolling, I don't see my behavior as such so you'd have to elaborate what you mean by that. Again I'm hoping to engage in conversations, if anything it seems to me you are the person trying to shut down conversations. Like if you disagree with me so vehemently you could actually state why you think I'm wrong and how your position is so much better, but instead I'm just called a poopoo head. Which is great to appeal to people who don't like poopoo heads but does nothing in terms of a conversation people can engage in.

As for why I came to Anews I had just recently found it along with Aragorns other works. So far A!'s thoughts have been pretty influential to me so I figured I'd try using some of these platforms to hopefully engage with people who were exploring the same ideas he was, but I have found at least in my limited experience, these spaces don't really seem to be the space to have those conversations for a variety of reasons.

As for being evicted from the pedo forums, being banned from Twitter has influenced me being here instead. And truthfully if I wasn't banned I'd probably still be there as even though most of the pedophiles I knew were still very much so left-anarchists, that environment had a lot more diverse conversation happening both exploring post left ideas but even left ideas in new lights in a way that was interesting and engaging.

You seem like a polite and articulate young man so welcome to the forum. Please do not advocate the abuse children and be sure to have a blessed day.

Again not a man, and i think anyone paying attention to the discourse around pedophilia could understand how its not about advocating for abuse, this is the central argument of both Child Molestation vs. Child Love and Alice in Monsterland. But keeping in the theme of topics being more complex then is comfortable for some people, there is also a part of this conversation that is about advocating for children to be allowed to be abused.

remember when you said "the taliban seems liberal" the other day? proof of extreme insincerity or something seriously wrong with your brain or both. case closed. but don't worry, I fully expect you to keep putting on this little circus of yours. troll on!

What about that statement seems insincere to you? I don't see how a governing force like the Taliban is not liberal. In a way the Islamic State (i think it was also called Daesh?) Much more fits into the liberal ideology more so then the U.S. which is more so recognized as liberal, if only for the scale of violence.

*circus music* step right up folks! argue with a troll jackass while your life slips through your fingers like grains of sand!

the race towards the inevitability of the grave can be EVEN FASTER! Get your wasted time RIGHT HERE!

Again, what do you even disagree with? What about my position do you conflate with being a troll? Why is you calling me a troll better for this conversation then just showing how I'm wrong?

you're making him look like a troll I could get behind compared to you) and I guess he could be more thankful for it.

so I don't think any honest, constructive, or just interesting online discussion can be had with someone who firmly believes that Daesh -or the Taliban- can only be "liberals". You might wanna be pushing the absurdist button, but you read like a moron, here. This kinda stupid shit is simply unworthy, and I WONDER WHY THE COLLECTIVE KEEPS REMOVING COMMENTS CRITICAL TO YOU WHILE GIVING YOU A FULL YEAR PASS IN HERE, but that's got nothing to do with the quality of your comments, or their contribution to a quality conversation.

Has Anews recently decided to go seppuku? I know the loss of A! was heavy... but some of you totally can keep it up.

Suicide don't do it, Thecollective. This site may not be so popular these days, but it's way better than the failure of C4SS, IGD and Crimethinc...

A-Zed does make a good point though, about duplicity conflated into pluralism.

Okay then. Can you elaborate? I disagree. What about. Could you please. Interesting. You seem very upset.

I'm glad someone understood the point :) do you have any thoughts in regards to that idea?

Still, I did not come out of it with an optimism for a project of synthesis or a collective force, partly because of how the passages below resonated with me. The quips I added are my impressions upon reading them.

"...anarchists share a tendency to waver between dogmatism and dispersion, with consequences for both individual and collective practice that are all too predictable. The consolation for anarchists is that the difficulties that lead to this sort of wavering are almost certainly structural..."

anrch(anything) is dispersion, an impasse

"The anarchist tradition is, in its actual form, simply the ensemble of all that anarchists are saying about anarchism or anarchist ideas in any given moment, together with whatever share of historical anarchist utterances remain active in some sense in anarchist discourse. It is not a sum or resultant. We cannot count on it to “add up” in any very consistent sense. Indeed, we expect that it would exhibit considerable conflict and inconsistency, assuming we could somehow make all of its elements simultaneously present to consciousness."

anarch(anything) is a hodgepodge ensemble of utterings, a cacophony of contradictions, conflict and discord

"...-isms as “not worth a pair of boots,”..."

"...the collective manifestations of anarchism have remained primarily spaces of conflict, compromise and failure."

" To at least start to address that question, I want to return to the “general formula”: Anarchism = (((an + arche)ist)ism)"

this reminds me of what Wittgenstein said about truth propositions and language games, & analytic philosophers resorting to formal logic & math, & math itself being a doomed endeavor

"We’re looking for ways to “fix” the terms of analysis enough so that we are not constantly struggling with various kinds of semantic noise and slippage, while still respecting what is fundamentally anarchic and ungovernable in both the concepts and the bodies of theory and practice we are hoping to examine. In that context, anarchy is the term that needs to be defined with the greatest care."

Anarch(anything) is an empty signifier, the place of noise and slippage.

"...the anarchy of our anarchisms seems to emerge from uncertainty about the shared ideal, from the substitution of some other guiding concept for anarchy “in the full force of the term,” [...] the “anarchisms” in question are ultimately incommensurable—and we may not even be able to have a good fight about them. Rather than a plurality of anarchisms, we have some form of dispersion, obscured by shared terms."

"when anarchists find themselves talking about the different meanings of important keywords, it is to acknowledge that we may simply be speaking at cross-purposes—whether or not that recognition leads us to make the clarifications presumably called for. It probably makes a lot more sense to be on particularly our guard against missteps as we play anarchic games with the language and concepts associated with anarchy"

anarch(anything/whatever) is an instance of wordplay at its origin & core, as useful/useless as a pun

"...it is really the most general sort of anarchism that confronts us most dauntingly as we are attempting to become an anarchist, whether we are beginners trying to confront or embrace it all at once or whether we are old-timers forced to deal with how much anarchism there is out there that is so clearly not “our own.”"

no anarch(whatever) is our own, except our own, because it's many made-up things upon which there's no agreement

“Profusion and uncertainty” is the formula I have used in other writings to gesture at the ways that anarchy provides us with both too much and too little, all at the same time. Anarchism-in-general seems to frustrate our needs and expectation in similar ways."

"what it would take for anarchism-in-general to be recognized among anarchists as a space of solidarity, rather than primarily a space of distinction and conflict"

anarch(whatever) is distinction & conflict, all unity & solidarity is outside of it

Anarchism = (((an + arche)ist)ism)

This equation makes no logical or mathematical sense, "an-" is an operation of subtraction, annulling, annihilating:
Anarchy = arche - arche = 0, Anarchy= 0

But just as some infinities are bigger than others, some zeros are bigger than others:
Nihilism = everything - everything = 0, Nihilism= 0

If anarchy is the event of this annulling of arche, and arche and anarchy are mutually exclusive events, they can be expressed by using the complement rule in probability. q = 1 − p
P(Anarchy) = 1 – P(Arche), or P(Arche) = 1 – P(Anarchy), or 1 = P(Anarchy) + P(Arche)

Since we know for a fact that arche exists, then that would mean that the probability of anarchy existing would be zero, and the probability of arche existing would be 1. That would mean arche is a certain event, while anarchy is an impossible event.
Expressed as propositional equivalences, that would make arche a tautology, and anarchy, a contradiction.
A tautology is a proposition that is always true. Example 2.1.1. p ∨¬p
A contradiction is a proposition that is always false. Example 2.1.2. p ∧¬p

That is assuming they're mutually exclusive events. Not all mutually exclusive events are commonly exhaustive.

If anarchy as an event is dependent on arche ocurring, then the conditional probability would be expressed as:
Conditional Probability of Anarchy given Arche: P (Anarchy|Arche) = P(Anarchy ∩ Arche)⁄P(Arche)

If anarchy and arche are independent events, we can't know the probability of anarchy if we know the probability of arche:
P Anarchy ∩ Arche = P Arche .P Anarchy

Both could occur at the same time, as well as at different times, and you could draw a venn diagram of the times they coincide and don't.

In this case, anarchy expressed as a propositional equivalency would be a contingency. A contingency is a proposition that is neither a tautology nor a contradiction. Example 2.1.3. p ∨q →¬r

References:
- How to Prove the Complement Rule in Probability, https://www.thoughtco.com/prove-the-complement-rule-3126554
- Binomial distribution, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution
- Propositional Equivalences, https://www.math.fsu.edu/~pkirby/mad2104/SlideShow/s2_2.pdf
- Propositional Logic: Syntax, https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs280/2008sp/280wk12_x4.pdf
- Musings on Nothingness (And some of its varieties), https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/baedan-musings-on-nothingness

Authoritarian idiots who get fried on a pan = 0

Coz I sed so. Basic math n logic!

All of this work is a response to my own deep misgivings about the viability of anarchism as a project, nurtured by decades of experience of anarchist dysfunction and historical research suggesting that the problems are as integral to actually existing anarchism as any of the other elements we could point to. But all of that is balanced against my sense that, if the last 140 years haven't amounted to a particularly good start for an anarchism that could really reward all of us who would like to see considerably more anarchy in our lives, that historical development has also contained a lot of useful indications—often as a kind of countercurrent within better known anarchist movements—about how things might work out differently without huge shifts in our understanding of anarchy and the ways it might manifest itself in the world.

I'm happiest telling stories about anarchist weirdos for anarchist weirdos, focusing on "the beautiful idea" and not worrying too much about those for whom a strong concept of anarchy really has very little appeal. But my work on the margins has been successful enough that I've been offered opportunities to also present more "mainstream" anarchist figures from my somewhat idiosyncratic perspective. Easier said than done, of course, particularly with the Chomskyarchists and anarcho-democrats emerging as a more active force in anarchist circles. So it has seemed to make sense, in the relative solitude imposed by the pandemic, to see if I can at least articulate some bridges between my various interests. If nothing else, it will make it easier to get some book introductions written.

And if the little toolkit that I feel like I'll be able to offer isn't interesting to other anarchists, perhaps because they would like to believe that it isn't necessary, I still get the benefit of a direct confrontation with my individual concerns—and I get clarity about how much more of this kind of public engagement it makes sense to bother with.

Libertarian Labyrinth is the best example how anarchism as a nightmare of theories, can be the most refined antidote to anarchy. With people mudding their minds with so many theories, anarchy would be a hell of rational logic. Keep things simple, anarchy is the state of nature. Taoists made it much more understandable.

Keep things simple, anarchy is the state of nature."

1000% on board with that. Shawn/Humanispherian's BIG project sounded like a deceitful convoluted mess from the start.

I see you are sulking with me and avoiding any instructional conversation with me, so I am interjecting my wisdom into this regardless of whether you reply!
Obviously it is to retain the 95% of our ---animalism--- in our mindset. To live for the moment as if there is no tomorrow FOR 95% of the time, the other 5% to think of tomorrow, of the journey ahead, of footwear and clothing for the coming winter, or the food that is about to ripen in a few days, the basic survival logic.
Now get that grey matter thinking for yourself and offering ideas and stop asking soooo many questions.

Let me answer your question with an equally deep question: if we press together our butts and I fart into your butthole is the fart still my fart or does it become your fart?

For me anarch life is having ---finite death consciousness---and this is why!
1)Any perp could die tomorrow, therefore live in the Now, be grateful for just living and seeing a new day everyday.
2)Therefore, don't take out mortgage or invest money if you have any.
3)Therefore, if you happen to have surplus food somehow, like you found some wild orange trees, you give them away, cos if you hide them and then die, they will rot. What a waste.
4)If you inherited a block of apartments, you don't rent them out, you make them available for free cos you could die tomorrow, so why collect rent and suffer all the stress of collecting it.
5)The example you set by giving stuff away has made you many friends and when you do finally die, they all celebrate and carry on your example. Eventually, everyone lives the way you do, and the anarch way of life spreads throughout the world,

This earlier comment 3) of mine needs refinement. Observe the squirrel hoarding nuts. So if living in harsh environment the storage of existential goods is the exception in the stockpiling of foods, and after the existential event, usually climatic, has passed, then the surplus is gifted out (potlatch) planted to grow into more food (proto-agriculture), experimented with (invention) or gorged upon.

I like it. It's an oversimplification though because:
1) You could just as easily live 80 years and with no thought for the future it's going to be more stressful and ful of deprivation than necessary.
2) Definitely live within your means. But nothing wrong with gaining advantage from others non-violent production, imho.
3) The possiblity of successfully hunting and gathering all your food and needs is next to impossible. Not only may you die tomorrow following this course, you probably will. Again, unnecessary stress and deprivation foisted upon oneself. Garden and definitely practice agriculture to store food for lean seasons and have more to share with others and can even teach them how to sustain themselves.
4) If you inherit an apartment block, there are taxes and repairs and fees. You couldn't just give away for free. After a short time they would be rendered unlivable and get seized by government. Then you have done yourself or your new friends a disservice. You should charge just enough to keep them paid for and to make any repairs. Thereby ensuring long-term, affordable, stable homes for people who will truly thank you in the end.
5) Same conclusion. You were helpful, not greedy, and made friends that celebrated and emulated your actions which made the world a better place. More people adopted these ideals over time and anarch spreads.

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