In Defense of Anarchy (Encore)

And how it's all around us whether we know it or not

Hi All! I traveled this last week and really just didn’t have it in me to produce new content, I thought it would be fun to repurpose a past post. I’ve been at this long enough that I have quite a bit of content that at least half (if not maybe more) of this audience hasn’t seen unless they went way back into the archives. So today, you get treated to one of my favorites—and a favorite from many OG subscribers—about my evolving relationship with the concepts of anarchy. I’ll be back next week with some brand new content, but in the meantime, enjoy this one, originally posted on December 22, 2022.

My friend Davis is a self-described anarchist. I’m not sure exactly how I came to know this information, but it was early on in our friendship, perhaps from one of our many conversations about politics. In the beginning, I kind of took the information with a grain of salt. He wasn’t what I thought an anarchist would look like. I had pictured some pink-haired punk rocker running around town spray painting the sides of buildings yelling “DOWN WITH THE MAN.” Davis on the other hand was a dad of young kids, former military, and really damn good at home projects. Yeah, he had a lot of tattoos. We’re in Portland, everyone has a lot of tattoos. But anarchist? Nah, it didn’t fit with what I thought. I had also never really talked to anyone who called themselves an anarchist. Socialist, sure. In fact, I think of myself as a socialist, but not an anarchist. Was that even a political leaning? Or was it a way of being? 

It’s a bit ironic that I was even skeptical of the term anarchism because I had long since gotten over the socialism-is-bad hump. I came around to socialist ideas 13-14 years or so ago during my grad program in education policy. Exploring political economy from a variety of different standpoints that didn’t center capitalism as the end-all-be-all made me realize that maybe unfettered capitalism wasn’t the only way an economy should be organized (I still have my very heavily marked-up copy of Gar Alperovitz’s America Beyond Capitalism—one of the required reading for one of the foundational courses I took—on my bookshelf). From then on I called myself a democratic socialist. So even though a decade and a half ago I had unlearned the very American revulsion to socialism, I still didn’t investigate the resistance to the term “anarchy.” While I wasn’t inclined to be repelled by the term, I also never really investigated it beyond how it’s used through the lens of mainstream skepticism.

Knowing Davis identified as an anarchist helped plant a seed, though. It made me realize I didn’t actually know what anarchism was. After all, I’ve become more radical in my politics as I’ve gotten older and had a kid (not the typical White parental trajectory, ha). So why can’t I come around to a new idea even in my forties? 

About the time that I’d started to reconsider my pre-existing notions of anarchism, I embarked upon this cramming for the apocalypse project. For the past year, I’ve been devouring books and other materials more than I ever have since I graduated from my writing program in 2016. And suddenly “anarchy” was everywhere. Not that what I was reading was anarchist in nature, rather I was coming across ideas about anarchy even in places I didn’t expect. Anarchy, in the best sense, was all around me. 

Anarchy came up in a place where I least expected, in a book that I was not necessarily reading for this project. It was reading for pure pleasure, specifically, comedian Maeve Higgins’ delightfully funny and poignant collection of essays Tell Everyone on this Train I Love Them. In her essay New York, Fair or No Fair, she addresses the waning Trump administration’s designation of New York City as an anarchist jurisdiction. As a happy resident of New York, Higgins didn’t see chaos, she saw people living and enjoying their lives. A man enjoying the sunshine on a Brooklyn basketball court, a child’s “graffiti” asking people not to step on the bees. This contradiction of right-wing fear-mongering against the daily beauty she saw around her made her want to understand the term anarchy a bit more. She was describing the moment I was in as I read her essay, wondering if I really knew what the term actually meant.

So she reached out to Cal State LA professor, Robert Weide and he told her: “Anarchists say that in a crisis, people revert back to what comes naturally to them, which is mutual aid.” In fact, the term “mutual aid” comes from Russian anarchist and scientist, Peter Kropotkin, who is credited with many of the concepts of anarchy. In capitalist societies like ours in the U.S., mutual aid has historically served as an important resource for lower-income communities not served effectively by the government due to systemic racism and structural inequality. For example, those socialist-leaning policies such as the New Deal and the GI bill were structured to favor White working class folks and White veterans. Mutual aid has seen a renaissance in the pandemic years among the broader society as government structures proved ineffective to withstand a global disruption of this kind, but especially for people of color and lower-income families. What we don’t realize is that mutual aid is inherently anarchist.

“Kropotkin believed,” writes Higgins, “that competing with each other, or controlling and exploiting each other for individual gain, is not the wisest way to ensure the survival of our species. Rather, he proposed that humans actually stood a better chance of survival through protecting and cooperating with each other, and that is something we do naturally without coercive State controlling and patrolling our actions.”  

These natural inclinations toward humanity Higgins and Weide describe come up time and time again after disasters. The themes of anarchism are present in almost every example of the actions taken by disaster communities in Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. Three days after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, local San Franciscan Amelia Holshouser, who had been camping out in Union Square downtown with other displaced people, started a soup kitchen “with one tin can to drink from and one pie plate to eat from.” Over the next few days, people worked together to bring in stoves from damaged buildings and purchase utensils from across the bay in Oakland and the kitchen grew exponentially to feed thousands as well as being a meeting place and hub for other mutual aid efforts such as community centers and relief projects. Dubbed the Mizpah Cafe, the kitchen ran from April to June 1906 largely through the coordinated efforts of a spontaneously organized group of people motivated by collective survival and a sense of humanity.

“In [disasters], strangers become friends and collaborators, goods are shared freely, people improvise new roles for themselves,” Solnit writes. “Imagine a society where money plays little or no role, where people rescue each other and then care for each other, where food is given away, where life is mostly out of doors in public, where the old divides between people seem to have fallen away, and the fate that faces them, no matter how grim, is far less so for being shared.” It is a utopia that she writes about. A utopia centered around shared humanity, giving, and solidarity. And this, Solnit says, is our “default setting.” 

That “default setting” is what I think professor Robert Weide–who Maeve Higgins interviewed–means by humans returning to what comes natural to them. To work together in solidarity and collectivism. 

Solnit also writes of Dorothy Day who was eight at the time of the San Francisco earthquake, an event that shaped her and her life’s work. As an adult in 1933, together with Peter Maurin, launched the Catholic Worker penny newspaper that was rooted in their anarchist values and became the starting point of the Catholic Worker Movement where, by 1939, the paper had a distribution of around 200,000, nearly two dozen Houses of Hospitality that served homeless people were established across the country, there were two farms, and study groups all over the country explored the ideas and values of the movement. The anarchist approach to mutual aid met the needs of Depression era America. 

And then when The New Deal was launched in 1939, Day critiqued this top-down government approach. Hers and the Catholic Worker Movement was distinctly anarchist that considered government coordination and intervention serving as only getting in the way of what works for communities. “They wanted the needs of the poor to be met personally and the poor to become participants in their own care and thereby members of the community,” wrote Solnit. “The state removed that obligation.”

When I read this passage, a lightbulb went off. I get why the ideas of anarchy probably came around to be associated with the ideas of chaos. The lack of government to so many people, both on the right and left, seemed like chaos. And there’s a propaganda-ness about this chaotic framing of anarchy. For my leftist values, I had always trended towards the-bigger-the-government-the-better views. You know, the socialist values that the government should provide a social safety net for all people, to help level the playing field, and to distribute the wealth. Anything on the opposite end of the spectrum would fall squarely into the libertarian don’t-tread-on-me individualism. It didn’t even occur to me that there was another option. 

Anarchism saw the ineffectiveness of government operations in multiple ways. In some cases, institutionalizing these communities of mutual aid eventually turned to bureaucratic sterilization and stripped the people who used those spaces of their dignity. This happened to those spontaneous efforts like the Mitzpah Cafe in San Francisco in 1906. “The immediate aftermath of the disaster, in which everything was topsy-turvy, money was scarce to irrelevant, citizens improvised their own care, and much was given away rapidly, yielded to more institutional management of the disaster, which was often effective but seldom joyous,” wrote Solnit. In fact many of the spontaneous community kitchens were adopted as government run soup kitchens that required tickets from refugees to prevent people from eating more than one serving. A culture of trust in the form of community was replaced by a culture of mistrust through institutionalization.

Later with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, there was evidence that moving beyond a model of institutional charity to one of mutual support and community and solidarity was more effective in both the providing for needs as well as creating spaces of joy and sharing. This sense of community is where anarchism differs greatly from libertarianism. While both have mistrust of the government, libertarianism is very much about individual rights rooted in personal property, whereas anarchism is a collective solidarity and community. 

As I was absorbing myself in all of this, some of my past conversations with Davis came back to me and I started to understand where he was coming from, specifically from the community standpoint. For example, when we talked about schools, I have always been an ardent supporter of public education, not only sending my child to public school, but by investing in them as well as doing what we can, especially as White families to desegregate them. Public education is a public good that has been undermined by privatization over the past few decades. Davis, on the other hand, while not necessarily against public education, had mentioned that, while he supports public schools, he mistrusts the fact that the curriculum is, in a sense, instituted by the government. He questioned if that was good for kids to be participating in this top-down approach and wondered if it made more sense for kids to grow up within a smaller community setting for school.

Overlaying this conversation with what I’ve learned about anarchism, it finally occurred to me that this idea of community was anarchist in nature. Community is central to that and a community committed to the same values of giving and sharing and collaboration is a part of that. That isn’t to say that I was fully on board with the ideas. I completely see the point that the government often gets in the way of the good. There were countless examples in Rebecca Solnit’s book: police indiscriminately shooting people in the rubble after the 1906 earthquake assuming they were looting when they were trying to save their neighbors; the “highly functional bottom-up organization” commissary shuttling goods between the piers and Ground Zero in the aftermath of 9-11 butting up against the top-down organizations such as the National Guard; local city governments preventing groups of people seeking refuge from crossing into neighboring towns of New Orleans after Katrina.  

So I get that distrust. And that government isn’t free of ideology. Take the book banning and “don’t say gay” bills being imposed by right-wing politicians trying to hide the truths of our history and culture. I don’t want my kid to be shielded from the truth so I don’t want this top-down censorship. But I also want all kids to have the same educational opportunities as every other kid around them no matter their socioeconomic status. I want full funding for schools. I also want teachers to have the freedom to adapt their teaching to the kids they’re with. I want everyone to have access to all the medical care they need without fear of going into debt or bankruptcy. I want people to live in community with one another and participate in a giving and sharing economy versus an economy built on constant wealth accumulation. I want it all.

Nonetheless, these conversations with Davis and what I was reading have helped me see the beauty in anarchy. While not necessarily calling myself an anarchist just yet, there are elements of the model that I appreciate and now see everywhere. 

Maeve Higgins was having the same epiphany as she talked with Professor Weide. She brought up a comedy writer friend who paid for 100 haircuts for kids before schools started after the pandemic lockdowns and a free book exchange at a city park. “Yup, that’s anarchism,” responded Weide. “All that activity is based on an anarchist framework, whether people who are practicing or knowing it or not.” 

These examples show that there’s an anarchist in all of us because there’s a sense of humanity in all of us. It is rooted in love and care for one another, and it’s rooted in solidarity. So the next time you put a book in your neighborhood free library, that’s anarchy. The donation you make to the mutual aid network serving your local community, that’s anarchy. The sweater you give away in your local Buy Nothing Group, that’s anarchy. The meal you cook for a neighbor having a rough week, that’s anarchy.

Anarchy is a part of all of us whether we know it or not.