I think that this is a generous and thoughtful case for taking anarchism seriously. I appreciate the way you distinguish it from chaos and tie it to cooperation and mutual aid.
What I find myself wondering is whether this vision of cooperation can be sustained if the deeper biological and somatic layers of human life are not properly included. When people are asked to cooperate across increasingly abstract or imposed structures, without strong, lived forms of belonging and boundary at the base, it often seems to require a kind of override—and that override tends to drain vitality over time. Real mutual aid might depend on people having intact, high-trust local roots to begin with, rather than trying to generate cooperation on top of weakened or flattened ones.
How do you see the relationship between anarchism’s suspicion of coercive state power and the need for people to remain rooted in smaller, more embodied forms of order and belonging?
For me, Anarchism isn't about upending the world, but about breaking the Randian consensus that selfishness is the only important human characteristic. What Kropotkin introduced, and has been reinforced by Ostrom and others, is that we are equally (if not more) collaborative and interested in mutual aid.
What Anarchism articulates is that structures of power always attract the worst people, meaning the society takes on the characteristic of the psychopaths and narcissists, not people who would just as soon get along and not consume more than they need. If we cannot get rid of the bad people, we should concentrate on reducing the power we grant them.
Having always had a strong anarchic streak in me (including good vibes from the FAI exercise under the Spanish Republic before it was defeated by the fascists - and the communists) I like the look of this.
I would give you all the love in the world, but to learn from you is to lead you from where we get to be to somwhere else, but that is not a redesign per se, if we stop the enforcement there is something there that will...bring in the question of will?
I am trying to preorder…we in the EU are often left out of the preorder cycle on UK books. I am trying Blackwells which has had generous EU shipping policies heretofore.
I am interested in this perspective because I am grappling with imagining a way forward on problems of international scope like climate and agreement on human rights and responsibilities beyond national (and bioregional) borders as the post WWII framework collapses.
I was very moved by his film and will buy the book, but I’m not sure defining the systems in the places he visited or discussed as “Anarchism”, is helpful. He was describing a particular, utopian form. The term comes with a lot of baggage. Nevertheless, I applaud his call for a more cooperative society based on mutual support and inclusion, by whatever name. His experience of being close to power makes his arguments compelling.
I got bored reading the long text. It does not have the spunk, if this is how you do it, to transcribe something that was a dialogue, couldn't you have made it shorter to the point you needed to drive home, because you lost me in the start, and still I soldiered on, but the lack of gravity was rampant
This sounds a lot like the non-dogmatic, contextual case for the anarchist tradition made in the works of the Bordeaux School, as I call Jacques Ellul and his mentor Bernard Charbonneau; the former known for his embrace of Christian anarchism, the latter having (fatefully in terms of their contrasted receptions) delegated the writing of the book on Technological Society to Ellul, who often pointed he was first introduced to the idea now associated with his name by Charbonneau, who preferred to tackle The State in his first book written at the same time (1949), figuring this idol was preventing all serious consideration of other power structures and had to be dealt with first, even though it probably could not be dispensed with altogether; just shorn of its standard capital and prestige among French writers, a practice he had started in their own ecological wing of the prewar Personalist movement, which they took to be all about giving Team Human the tools to prevail against the Machine.This sounds a lot like the non-dogmatic, contextual case for the anarchist tradition made in the works of the Bordeaux School, as I call Jacques Ellul and his mentor Bernard Charbonneau; the former known for his embrace of Christian anarchism, the latter having (fatefully in terms of their contrasted receptions) delegated the writing of the book on Technological Society to Ellul, who often pointed he was first introduced to the idea now associated with his name by Charbonneau, who preferred to tackle The State in his first book written at the same time (1949), figuring this idol was preventing all serious consideration of other power structures and had to be dealt with first, even though it probably could not be dispensed with altogether; just shorn of its standard capital and prestige among French writers, a practice he had started in their own ecological wing of the prewar Personalist movement, which they took to be all about giving Team Human the tools to prevail against the Machine. I like to see their approach, the most consistent form of what is known in French historiography as the ‘Non-conformism of the 1930s’, seeking ways out of the impasse of a civilization in crisis beyond the readymade formulas of Right and Left and moderate centrism, as an early instance of Metamodernism. I think this will come out of my exploration of unknown primary materials on the new substack I am launching to make my efforts to this end as independent scholar and translator available in English; see my introductory post at Personalist Papers, https://christianroy181311.substack.com/
This is all very good. As is Ross's substack. Yet, this dodges a central question: The direct power of corporations, who would like nothing better than to see government wane, so have sided in the U.S. with Trump's dismantling of government agencies and agency. There is but a difference in coloration between Chomsky's anarchism and the Koch brothers' libertarianism -- where government steps aside to let the large oil interests (including the Koch family) to run the world.
In a way this resembles the 'carbon footprint' PR campaign of British Petroleum -- don't worry about what the corporations are doing, let alone worry about strengthening government to reign them in, just worry about your own individual -- and in the case of anarchist philosophy, collective -- action.
I'm sure I'll buy the book and read it closely. But what is the anarchist play against the corporations who are most directly responsible for ecological doom?
Changing the definition of property so that it can still be held, but only through possession and labor, not by contract. So there are no landlords, because you own whatever place you live in solely by living there - and although that right is transferable (you can sell your home), the party you sell it to loses it unless they also occupy the space. There is no stock market because every corporation is owned jointly by its laborers, who forfeit their share when they stop contributing labor to the project. There can be markets, buying and selling, but there can be no employees, because every worker is an owner. Because there are no employees to extract surplus value from, there is no class of ultra wealthy accruing wealth from capital without labor. This is the anarchist version of socialism that was envisioned by the founding class of American libertarians - Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, etc. - in the annals of the journal Liberty, before the word was co-opted by capitalists.
When every major corporate decision is made collectively and discussed openly among laborers, there is no room for the ignorance and disaffection that the current corporate class rely on to make amoral decisions with impunity.
Okay. I'm in Vermont with many "B Corporations" (i.e. "public benefit") as well as worker-owned corporations (often a company is both). This works well for some small to mid-sized enterprises. But how would this scale up to, say, produce wind turbines, or handle research and development of electric airplanes?
And what of intellectual property? If I write a song that becomes popular, do I share the earnings from it with everyone else who chooses to sing it? If I invent a 20% more efficient solar panel, do I earn merely the same from that as each person on the assembly line?
And when we travel, who maintains the hotels? Do we own the rooms we stay in overnight? Or do the hotels all shut down and we're back to finding homes with spare bedrooms along the roads, as was the case for rural travel in America in the early 20th century?
And, not to defend the rich, but what of capital risk? If an employee-owned company goes bankrupt, do the employees then lose their homes to settle their joint debt? And what do we do about monopolistic craft guilds? Or fair employment? Who can a collective refuse to hire?
An AI would be able to answer all of these for you. Ask it for a mutualist, (anti-capitalist) market anarchist, or libertarians socialist answer. More or less, there’s lots of possible answers because the essence of it is letting people decide for themselves how to run things while avoiding centralization of power and hierarchical structures within reason.
The book Mutualist Political Economy by Kevin Carson would likely interest you as well, or if you’re less interested in markets, Murray Bookchin’s books on social ecology and communitarianism. For essays, Emma Goldman’s Anarchism & Other Essays is a classic.
No offense, but fuck AI. My questions aren't on the ideal system. I love the anarchist ideal. I read Bookchin and Goldman over half a century ago as a teenager. What they don't answer is how to structure an economy heavily dependent on technology, and it's continued advance (in some areas, again, fuck AI). How might a workers cooperative, formed from scratch, construct the next factory to turn out vehicles equal to or superior to those currently produced by the highly-hierarchical Chinese model? If you sat down with a few thousand unemployed auto workers in Detroit, could you tell them how to do this?
I'm not asking this to frustrate you. I'd love to live in an ideal anarchy. The question is about the path there from here. Given no path, it's just another impossible dream, of value only as impossible dreams can be.
You're giving anarchism a value it doesn't fundamentally have. Anarchism is the idea that everyone makes their own decisions, nothing more. It has nothing to do with what the effect on anything other than the individuals intentions are. What you espouse is a particular expression of pseudo anarchic governance. Because any form of agreement between parties is a form of governance.
Your misplaced definition of anarchism, what might be called a benevolent or responsible anarchy, is a highly desirable form of governance, what was intended by the Founding Fathers of these United States.
But as with all systems, the psychopaths and sociopaths wormed their way into the core of the system and reshaped it to their own benefit. Psychopaths who are closer to true anarchists than anyone you mention in your essay. These are the people who make their decisions without regard for the consequences to others. With the notable exception of the other psychopaths they've made agreements with.
True anarchy isn't desirable in a highly populated world, and benevolent anarchy isn't possible in population densities higher than the Dunbar Number range.
So let's hold on to our hope for the ideal realization of civilization and work toward a way to keep the psychopaths out of positions of authority. Anyone have any ideas?
I think that this is a generous and thoughtful case for taking anarchism seriously. I appreciate the way you distinguish it from chaos and tie it to cooperation and mutual aid.
What I find myself wondering is whether this vision of cooperation can be sustained if the deeper biological and somatic layers of human life are not properly included. When people are asked to cooperate across increasingly abstract or imposed structures, without strong, lived forms of belonging and boundary at the base, it often seems to require a kind of override—and that override tends to drain vitality over time. Real mutual aid might depend on people having intact, high-trust local roots to begin with, rather than trying to generate cooperation on top of weakened or flattened ones.
How do you see the relationship between anarchism’s suspicion of coercive state power and the need for people to remain rooted in smaller, more embodied forms of order and belonging?
For me, Anarchism isn't about upending the world, but about breaking the Randian consensus that selfishness is the only important human characteristic. What Kropotkin introduced, and has been reinforced by Ostrom and others, is that we are equally (if not more) collaborative and interested in mutual aid.
What Anarchism articulates is that structures of power always attract the worst people, meaning the society takes on the characteristic of the psychopaths and narcissists, not people who would just as soon get along and not consume more than they need. If we cannot get rid of the bad people, we should concentrate on reducing the power we grant them.
Just great! Greetings from an explicitly anarchist Danish publisher.
Having always had a strong anarchic streak in me (including good vibes from the FAI exercise under the Spanish Republic before it was defeated by the fascists - and the communists) I like the look of this.
I wrote it down.
Interesting and resonates with me in two ways
My 'headline' 'The Explorer is Not the Expedition' is 'pure' anarchism
My blogs on Substack aren’t openly advertised, but internally they 'probably' mean ‘How to be an anarchist’. ;-)
alan rayner just gave me the definition of gravity, central receptive influence, and this peice lacks that in trying to be whole
I would give you all the love in the world, but to learn from you is to lead you from where we get to be to somwhere else, but that is not a redesign per se, if we stop the enforcement there is something there that will...bring in the question of will?
Very interesting, I think I’ll be ordering. But why on earth would you recommend buying a book on anarchy through Amazon or Waterstones?
I am trying to preorder…we in the EU are often left out of the preorder cycle on UK books. I am trying Blackwells which has had generous EU shipping policies heretofore.
I am interested in this perspective because I am grappling with imagining a way forward on problems of international scope like climate and agreement on human rights and responsibilities beyond national (and bioregional) borders as the post WWII framework collapses.
Is there somewhere I can pre-order in the EU (Germany)?
It’s not that easy sadly; as a rule of thumb you can use the relevant Amazon site depending on which EU country you are in.
I was very moved by his film and will buy the book, but I’m not sure defining the systems in the places he visited or discussed as “Anarchism”, is helpful. He was describing a particular, utopian form. The term comes with a lot of baggage. Nevertheless, I applaud his call for a more cooperative society based on mutual support and inclusion, by whatever name. His experience of being close to power makes his arguments compelling.
I got bored reading the long text. It does not have the spunk, if this is how you do it, to transcribe something that was a dialogue, couldn't you have made it shorter to the point you needed to drive home, because you lost me in the start, and still I soldiered on, but the lack of gravity was rampant
Solidarity 🚩🏴✊
This sounds a lot like the non-dogmatic, contextual case for the anarchist tradition made in the works of the Bordeaux School, as I call Jacques Ellul and his mentor Bernard Charbonneau; the former known for his embrace of Christian anarchism, the latter having (fatefully in terms of their contrasted receptions) delegated the writing of the book on Technological Society to Ellul, who often pointed he was first introduced to the idea now associated with his name by Charbonneau, who preferred to tackle The State in his first book written at the same time (1949), figuring this idol was preventing all serious consideration of other power structures and had to be dealt with first, even though it probably could not be dispensed with altogether; just shorn of its standard capital and prestige among French writers, a practice he had started in their own ecological wing of the prewar Personalist movement, which they took to be all about giving Team Human the tools to prevail against the Machine.This sounds a lot like the non-dogmatic, contextual case for the anarchist tradition made in the works of the Bordeaux School, as I call Jacques Ellul and his mentor Bernard Charbonneau; the former known for his embrace of Christian anarchism, the latter having (fatefully in terms of their contrasted receptions) delegated the writing of the book on Technological Society to Ellul, who often pointed he was first introduced to the idea now associated with his name by Charbonneau, who preferred to tackle The State in his first book written at the same time (1949), figuring this idol was preventing all serious consideration of other power structures and had to be dealt with first, even though it probably could not be dispensed with altogether; just shorn of its standard capital and prestige among French writers, a practice he had started in their own ecological wing of the prewar Personalist movement, which they took to be all about giving Team Human the tools to prevail against the Machine. I like to see their approach, the most consistent form of what is known in French historiography as the ‘Non-conformism of the 1930s’, seeking ways out of the impasse of a civilization in crisis beyond the readymade formulas of Right and Left and moderate centrism, as an early instance of Metamodernism. I think this will come out of my exploration of unknown primary materials on the new substack I am launching to make my efforts to this end as independent scholar and translator available in English; see my introductory post at Personalist Papers, https://christianroy181311.substack.com/
This is all very good. As is Ross's substack. Yet, this dodges a central question: The direct power of corporations, who would like nothing better than to see government wane, so have sided in the U.S. with Trump's dismantling of government agencies and agency. There is but a difference in coloration between Chomsky's anarchism and the Koch brothers' libertarianism -- where government steps aside to let the large oil interests (including the Koch family) to run the world.
In a way this resembles the 'carbon footprint' PR campaign of British Petroleum -- don't worry about what the corporations are doing, let alone worry about strengthening government to reign them in, just worry about your own individual -- and in the case of anarchist philosophy, collective -- action.
I'm sure I'll buy the book and read it closely. But what is the anarchist play against the corporations who are most directly responsible for ecological doom?
Changing the definition of property so that it can still be held, but only through possession and labor, not by contract. So there are no landlords, because you own whatever place you live in solely by living there - and although that right is transferable (you can sell your home), the party you sell it to loses it unless they also occupy the space. There is no stock market because every corporation is owned jointly by its laborers, who forfeit their share when they stop contributing labor to the project. There can be markets, buying and selling, but there can be no employees, because every worker is an owner. Because there are no employees to extract surplus value from, there is no class of ultra wealthy accruing wealth from capital without labor. This is the anarchist version of socialism that was envisioned by the founding class of American libertarians - Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, etc. - in the annals of the journal Liberty, before the word was co-opted by capitalists.
When every major corporate decision is made collectively and discussed openly among laborers, there is no room for the ignorance and disaffection that the current corporate class rely on to make amoral decisions with impunity.
Okay. I'm in Vermont with many "B Corporations" (i.e. "public benefit") as well as worker-owned corporations (often a company is both). This works well for some small to mid-sized enterprises. But how would this scale up to, say, produce wind turbines, or handle research and development of electric airplanes?
And what of intellectual property? If I write a song that becomes popular, do I share the earnings from it with everyone else who chooses to sing it? If I invent a 20% more efficient solar panel, do I earn merely the same from that as each person on the assembly line?
And when we travel, who maintains the hotels? Do we own the rooms we stay in overnight? Or do the hotels all shut down and we're back to finding homes with spare bedrooms along the roads, as was the case for rural travel in America in the early 20th century?
And, not to defend the rich, but what of capital risk? If an employee-owned company goes bankrupt, do the employees then lose their homes to settle their joint debt? And what do we do about monopolistic craft guilds? Or fair employment? Who can a collective refuse to hire?
An AI would be able to answer all of these for you. Ask it for a mutualist, (anti-capitalist) market anarchist, or libertarians socialist answer. More or less, there’s lots of possible answers because the essence of it is letting people decide for themselves how to run things while avoiding centralization of power and hierarchical structures within reason.
The book Mutualist Political Economy by Kevin Carson would likely interest you as well, or if you’re less interested in markets, Murray Bookchin’s books on social ecology and communitarianism. For essays, Emma Goldman’s Anarchism & Other Essays is a classic.
No offense, but fuck AI. My questions aren't on the ideal system. I love the anarchist ideal. I read Bookchin and Goldman over half a century ago as a teenager. What they don't answer is how to structure an economy heavily dependent on technology, and it's continued advance (in some areas, again, fuck AI). How might a workers cooperative, formed from scratch, construct the next factory to turn out vehicles equal to or superior to those currently produced by the highly-hierarchical Chinese model? If you sat down with a few thousand unemployed auto workers in Detroit, could you tell them how to do this?
I'm not asking this to frustrate you. I'd love to live in an ideal anarchy. The question is about the path there from here. Given no path, it's just another impossible dream, of value only as impossible dreams can be.
You're giving anarchism a value it doesn't fundamentally have. Anarchism is the idea that everyone makes their own decisions, nothing more. It has nothing to do with what the effect on anything other than the individuals intentions are. What you espouse is a particular expression of pseudo anarchic governance. Because any form of agreement between parties is a form of governance.
Your misplaced definition of anarchism, what might be called a benevolent or responsible anarchy, is a highly desirable form of governance, what was intended by the Founding Fathers of these United States.
But as with all systems, the psychopaths and sociopaths wormed their way into the core of the system and reshaped it to their own benefit. Psychopaths who are closer to true anarchists than anyone you mention in your essay. These are the people who make their decisions without regard for the consequences to others. With the notable exception of the other psychopaths they've made agreements with.
True anarchy isn't desirable in a highly populated world, and benevolent anarchy isn't possible in population densities higher than the Dunbar Number range.
So let's hold on to our hope for the ideal realization of civilization and work toward a way to keep the psychopaths out of positions of authority. Anyone have any ideas?