Why I think anarchists should not abandon all left-wing mass movements

[WildVirtue]

Introduction​

There exists a way of defining left vs. right as a spectrum of political philosophies in which anarchism happens to be on the far-left.

I think it would be good to use and promote this definition because… if having one more opportunity to advertise our elemental philosophical similarities with political philosophies on the left would help clarify a clear road map for encouraging people to the far-left, as well as towards anti-authoritarianism, then doing so will likely help bring about an anarchist world faster.

I don’t find any solace or warm fuzzy feelings about identifying with the left, I just value a cold hard calculation of the benefits of being open about existing under a big tent of philosophies that if at strategically important times all pull together stand a better chance of achieving an incrementally less bad status quo, in the same way I would hold my nose and vote or pull the lever in the trolley problem.

The term anarchist often evokes ridicule today​

Most people hold a ton of misconceptions about what being an anarchist entails, whether it be that we’re naive about human nature, or that we all just want chaos and disorder.

If we came up with an entirely new word to call ourselves tomorrow, like ‘benows’, the media would simply again make the word synonymous with chaos, such that more people would be using ‘benows’ in conversation to refer to a state of chaos than the amount of people who even knew about anarchism.

So, either we acknowledge that fact and make a point of explicitly relating elements of our philosophy to leftist remedies which are less extreme, or we define ourselves as being outside the left vs. right paradigm and stand a far greater chance of people never shaking off the idea that we hold to some ridiculously irrational ideas.

In order to have any hope of upping our success rate at persuading more people over to our philosophy, we have to make the pragmatic optics decision in explicitly making clear that we’re both leftists and anarchists, that way for now, anchoring the term anarchist explicitly to a mainstream struggle of left vs. right economic & egalitarian politics.

The same way many socialists make the optics decision to tag on democratic to the word socialist.

That’s not to say we have to support or even be happy about every leftist tactic. Nor does it mean we can’t still be loud about our unique position on the radical fringe.

It’s simply about establishing one reference point for people to latch onto about our comparative elemental similarities, before we can then go on to distance ourselves in other elemental ways.

The most important thing about the Overton window, however, is that it can be shifted to the left or the right, with the once merely “acceptable” becoming “popular” or even imminent policy, and formerly “unthinkable” positions becoming the open position of a partisan base. The challenge for activists and advocates is to move the window in the direction of their preferred outcomes, so their desired outcome moves closer and closer to “common sense.”

There are two ways to do this: the long, hard way and the short, easy way. The long, hard way is to continue making your actual case persistently and persuasively until your position becomes more politically mainstream, whether it be due to the strength of your rhetoric or a long-term shift in societal values. By contrast, the short, easy way is to amplify and echo the voices of those who take a position a few notches more radical than what you really want.

For example, if what you actually want is a public health care option in the United States, coordinate with and promote those pushing for single-payer, universal health care. If the single-payer approach constitutes the “acceptable left” flank of the discourse, then the public option looks, by comparison, like the conservative option it was once considered back when it was first proposed by Orrin Hatch in 1994.

This is Negotiating 101.

Why can we not just only be friendly with vaguely anti-authoritarian people who are easier to win over to anarchism?​

I think we should be open to comparing elemental similarities with any person we hope to advocate over to our philosophy and strategies. So with centrists we should be open to arguing that we hold some positions they can relate to that are near to them on the left, and to liberals that we hold some positions which are near to them on the far-left, and to the far-left that we hold some positions that are near to them on the anti-authoritarian far-left to leave every avenue open.

In terms of appealing to socially conservative people who are skeptical of authority, the fact that we’re anti-authoritarian is clear in identifying with anarchism. I’m just not willing to give up the best optics chance we have of achieving our goals incrementally by being in common cause with big-tent leftism, because being colloquially left or right entails an important defining difference over ones economic and egalitarian values.

Also, to the extent we’re working on campaigns that have less ambitious goals than transitioning a piece of land or workplace to an entirely anarchist run project, I think it’s important for that campaign to have at least some big-tent leftist goals. Even if what the campaign is fighting for is the government to be less involved in some aspect of social life, because what we should want is to hold onto as much funding for social institutions like hospitals as we can until we can take over management.

Therefore I think big-tent leftist goals mostly overlap with seeking the kind of incremental positive liberties that would make for an easier shift towards anarchism.

Wouldn’t that mean sometimes walking shoulder to shoulder with left-authoritarians?​

Sometimes yes, like for instance if we wanted to be most effective at preventing a group of fascists from marching through an immigrant neighborhood and potentially hurting innocent people. I think we should accept our tactical allies in that circumstance.

Philosophy and history places us on a philosophical spectrum close to ML’s in some ways, like our similar desires to maximally meet everyone’s basic needs. In the same way that anyone right of us have elements of their philosophy which is more similar to fascism and weird anarcho-feudalists/capitalists.

But obviously the nearer we get to a far-left world, the more the differences between anarchists and tankies will be highlighted. So, I think that, in trying to reject that categorization by taking a hostile approach to leftists, when they’re trying to achieve incremental improvements, you actually doom us to being associated for longer.

Being overly concerned with this association, like the egoists who call social-anarchists ‘Lenin-light’ reminds me of anti-civs who accept the liberal critique of anarchism in believing that industrial society would be too difficult to maintain co-operatively, so requires force and coercion to be upheld.

Maybe you think you’re preserving a purer anarchism with a clearer focus, but you do so at the expense of tactical unity with people whose incremental remedies would help you, thereby weakening your resistance to the status quo.

So, yes if we were to naively imagine we could be allies to the very end and walk off into the sunset together we would likely be walking blindly into a backstabbing again. But I doubt history would call 1 anarchist and 1 ML working together against an entirely fascist world a death sentence. To the extent we ever look to have moved the Overton window even close to the far-left, we can begin to diverge on insisting our mass movement organizations focus on libsoc issues, then purely anarchist issues.

The importance of voting​

It’s often obvious which party is the lesser evil long-term and I think it’s virtuous to vote that way as more people will have a qualitatively less bad experience than the few who do. So it’s the trolley problem. We wouldn’t desire to put in the electoral system ourselves, but some of us engage with it for a few hours every 4 years and use the discourse surrounding it to rally people to the far-left.

I think we need to get well educated on how even the baby step policies toward the left would be an improvement on where we are now, we need to learn the internal politicking of government and get good at having friendly and persuasive arguments to appeal to friends and acquaintances basic intuitions.

The goal being that we can talk the latest news and (1) Win over conservatives to obvious empirically better policies on the left, and (2) Win over liberals when center-left parties are in power to feel dismayed at the slow pace of change, and so acknowledge how much better it would be if there was a market socialist in the position willing to rally people to demonstrate and strike to push through bills.

This still must entail a cynical clarity about how many swing voters you meet will be responding to the see saw effect in politics of blaming the last person in power for everything wrong, so knowing how much time to invest and picking your battles.

Having solely anarchist organizations that use solely anarchist tactics is important too​

Here is some advice that entails a mix of both pursuing big tent leftist goals and solely anarchist goals:

Mutual aid – We should put the time into helping our neighbors and volunteering, for example on a food not bombs stall, to both manifest and get enjoy the positive benefits of a communalist caring society.

Direct action – We should try to mostly choose targets which the largest amount of people can sympathize with most, for instance the sabotaging of a fox hunt in order to highlight the direction we’d like to move in with legal animal rights, going from mostly ending blood sports, to mostly ending animal captivity, to mostly ending hunting for taste pleasure.

Education – We should be educating ourselves and helping others know what work and rent union to join, what to keep a record of at work, how to defend yourself from rapists and fascists, how to crack a squat and how to write a press release, etc. Anarchist bookfairs and social centres can be great places to dip your toe in.

Campaigning – We should look for the easiest squeeze points to rack up small wins, like the picketing of a cafe to reclaim lost wages, so that word spreads and it creates a domino effect. Organisations like the International of Anarchist Federations can be useful for finding collaborators, but obviously don’t feel bad about forming your own allied organising group if the larger groups stop feeling useful to you.

Further Reading​

• Anarchists in Wonderland
• The Incremental Anarchist
• Disrupting The Purist Anarchist Pipeline
• Left-Anarchism & Post-Left Anarchy – A Compare & Contrast
• A Left-Anarchist Reading List – Critiquing Post-Left Anarchy

 

[MetalBryan]

I only speak for myself but it would be helpful to me if you put forward your practical ideas first - in this particular post everything under the "Having solely anarchist organizations that use solely anarchist tactics is important too" section. I'm old, books are heavy, my eyes are going so I don't tend to read at length if I'm not prepared, and I browse StP most often while drinking a beer after a long day. I guess I'm hoping that if you draw people in with some accessible tactics first they might come back later for the academic stuff. I'm a simple FnB potato chopper and in my experience the talk often drags down the work. The most important thing to me is that I want you to reach the left-authoritarians primarily because some of us just want to chop potatoes to feed people. We get shut out because there isn't one left-authority but many idiosyncratic groups and at face value I only belong to a couple of them.

I appreciate your posts thank you for taking the time to share them. Eat trash & be free.

 

[WildVirtue]

The most important thing to me is that I want you to reach the left-authoritarians primarily because some of us just want to chop potatoes to feed people.

I get you, I'd just suggest giving your eyes a break my friend and simply ignore some of my more specialized posts if you can see from the title that you're not concerned with what the counter arguments are aimed at. This was just a post offering arguments you can use on purist anarchists who think they're too knowledgeable about how to bring the system down in other ways than to waste their time at a food not bombs stall.

 

[The Toecutter]

The problem with placing anarchism on a left-right spectrum is that anarchism accommodates a wide range of philosophies and perspectives. There are anarcho-Communists, anarcho-Socialists, anarcho-Capitalists, anarcho-Mutualists, and many other subtypes. All of them are after the same basic thing: self determination and freedom from the control of others. For every left-wing authoritarian for which some principles of anarchism appeal, there is also a right-wing fascist for which the same holds true. The goal is to ultimately pull them over to our side, regardless of what worldview they originally came from.

 

[DreadForest]

All good points, though I've discovered an interesting phenomenon while volunteering at my local food bank. The discussion of mutual aid (to wit, helping our community via the food bank!), and the inevitable slide of the conversation towards the fact that our government offers pitiful help to disabled people, and then the business of how we could save the environment always comes down to everyone agreeing on anarchist core principles. If someone (me, it's always me!) points out that we're literally talking about anarchism, everyone immediately disavows it. Anarchy is scary and the average person is convinced it will immediately lead to bloodshed and rape in the streets. (It's not not even a surprise how the nice middle-aged ladies at the food bank sincerely believe fear of cops is the only thing preventing generally hideous male behaviour. Yikes. Who hurt you, ma'am?)

All of this is to say that I believe we need to hide under the Leftist umbrella until we've got strong examples of anarchist tactics and principles working. Which means we need to be out there joining the actions and partaking in mutual aid without waving the red and black. Do good work until people notice, and then point out, "right, it's been anarchism the whole time." (Gotta say, you want to find a bunch of unionists and anarchists where I live, you look at the counter-protesters turning up at the anti-trans rallies. They are loud and extremely effective at getting people out on no notice!)

 

[laughingman]

All very good and valid points. Not to mention a fantastic arrow pointing to an ideal I support. I adore political conversations like this. I do however find myself wondering at how we struggle as humans to label large complex groups of ideals into single words or phrases. I know this has a very important academic and philosophical reason. Anyone would struggle to talk about there thoughts and opinions quickly without these labels. However, how much is lost in the branding. How many small squabbles are lost and won for stubborn identity. Or the dislike of a word of phrase more then the principals for which it stands. How much less quarrelsome could we be if our meanings where spelled out in exacting terms. Dumping political party titles and philosophical or rhetorical categorization for the long way around. Explaining exactly what we mean when we talked about a thing. I wonder a lot how many of our problems are linguistic. Maybe that's just the optimist in me.

 

[DreadForest]

However, how much is lost in the branding. How many small squabbles are lost and won for stubborn identity. Or the dislike of a word of phrase more then the principals for which it stands. How much less quarrelsome could we be if our meanings where spelled out in exacting terms. Dumping political party titles and philosophical or rhetorical categorization for the long way around. Explaining exactly what we mean when we talked about a thing. I wonder a lot how many of our problems are linguistic. Maybe that's just the optimist in me.

You're so very right! It's a bit like talking to the average person raised in the American school system. They all nod along with Canadians and Europeans when we talk about how easy it is to have universal healthcare, but the second you use the term "socialism," their heads go up in flames. Propaganda is deep and pervasive. The kneejerk reactions people have are quite ingrained and hard to unlearn. (I'm absolutely willing to admit that if someone tells me they're conservative, I immediately assume they're a classist jerkoff with an axe to grind against women, so it's not as if I'm any better.)

I'm thinking I might invent a thing under the new romance novel genre called "Social Justice Romance" and call it "Anarchist Romance." Main characters that start out middle of the road lefties and get drawn into teaching at Free Schools or joining in environmental protest, all that sort of thing. High stakes and big drama while gently coaxing my readers into sliding the Overton window to the left a little bit more.