A late 20th century post-leftist school of anarchist thought identified and rejected the contrived ethic and dependency for work as a perversion inculcated to support the industrial process as well as the banking and speculative parasites that feed upon the torrents of essentially pointless activity.
Anarchy comes from the Greek word anarchia meaning no ruler. In modern terms it means having no Government or State controlling social affairs. More broadly, and I think more accurately, it means being without authoritarian and/or coercive social control – public or private.
Decision-making occurs by broad inclusion and overall consensus of the entire social group, without manipulative or dominating interference by systemic hierarchy or oversight. Depending upon the issue, inclusion in a particular process might be meritously demarcated on grounds such as clan, gender or age. The ideal to be maintained is to fully include all who can usefully contribute to, or who are meaningfully affected by, the issue and decision in question.
Anarchy is embodied in modern theory. However, as with most modern bodies of thought, it has divided into conflict between various threads of advocacy as much as it has delivered any clarity. Moreover, modern views are just theory. Importantly though, the basic process and intent native to anarchy has existed successfully and durably within many indigenous societies such as Australian aboriginals, the San, Piaroa, and even to some extant within the federated empire of the North American Iroquois.
Representative democracy has degenerated into a blatant puppet show. It is to social equity what World Federation Wrestling is to athletic contest.
This anarchic process is not easy to translate to issues and processes as we now see them active around us. The social mass is huge and the technical questions and contingent implications involved within even quite simple matters can be overwhelming. However we need to resist the reflex to discard the anarchic ideal as a naïve or practically impossible one. The horror of existing events and horizons requires us to make unusual efforts.
We need to consider whether the vast array and severity of our problems, the invisibility of any genuine solutions, and the nearly complete lack of meaningful involvement, agreement and thereby durable contentment within the social mass, are in fact all due to current scale and process being so wildly out of kilter with real needs.
These needs are the ones vital to us all as humans, and to our landscape as the unique placenta upon which we draw our breath, inhabit our dreams, and project our genes. These needs deserve priority over and above the fleeting comfort of familiarity or the intimidation of propriety. Our survival and health requires us to adjust the social process to whatever can best encompass human and bio-physical need, and to stop trying to madly adjust reality to whatever bizarre standards we might have somehow become so familiar with. It is possible to change our mind about what is important. It is impossible to amend inherent biology. Some people have to configure a beginning to the necessary conceptual journey so that others can more readily join in.
Due to a breathtakingly complete Orwellian manipulation of language, the term 'anarchy' has come to popularly mean chaos or a state of social disorder, and one that is likely to be violent in character. An 'anarchist' is most definitely considered to be a potentially violent and dangerous person.
Due to a breathtakingly complete Orwellian manipulation of language, the term 'anarchy' has come to popularly mean chaos or a state of social disorder, and one that is likely to be violent in character.
Without a word to encapsulate the concept of anarchy, and with which to easily and credibly bring it into discussion, awareness of and participation in the social opportunity and justice it offers is effectively non-existent.
The expungement of this naturally real and vital political concept from social view is similar to the near complete eradication from the public mind of the memory and theory of Henry George. That fact that most graduate economists cannot place this once phenomenally influential and popular man or his theory speaks volumes for the immense power and pernicious intent of the corporate state thickening around us.
This eradication also testifies to the genuine threat that both anarchy and Georgism pose to the corporate state. Both concepts offer ground away from the left/right dialectic that acts as a conceptual train-line conveying us unswervingly toward either the consummate corporate-globalist horizon looming ever closer, or to the horrendous train-wreck that beckons just short of that ugly horizon.
The facts suggest that anarchy and Georgism are mutually compatible whilst not being mutually inter-dependent. In other words, the two might be combined, or not, as deemed most advantageous by a social group. The former describes a method and character by which social issues are most equitably and productively resolved, whilst the latter provides a method by which social revenue can be equitably and productively raised within a private property system. The viable conjunction helps to illustrate a very real potential for anarchist process to facilitate function of either collective (tribal) or private (micro-capitalist) property systems, as might be socially preferred or incumbent.
Numerous 19th century theorists iterated formal views of anarchist ideals and process. Most were enveloped in the Hegelian dialectic active at the time that has since corralled twentieth century reality along a corridor to hell between convergent Left and Right ideologies. Thus classic versions of anarchistic theory are imbued with imagery and syntax that is explicitly anti-capitalist and at least tacitly pro-left.
Understandably the emergent form opposed the rampant social impacts of capitalism. Naively though, as so many people still do, it ignored the inherently stultifying nature of the scale and processes that erupted within capitalism. Even when these same forms prevailed within Communism, the blame fell entirely upon the authoritarian political process and not at all upon the innately inhuman works in train.
Late in the twentieth century a post-leftist stream of anarchist thought ... examined and rejected the contrived ethic and dependency for work as a perversion inculcated to bear aloft the industrial process as well as the banking and speculative parasites that feed upon the torrents of essentially pointless activity.
The salient current in this revitalised stream of anarchist thought is that physical form must befit desired social function. Humanity cannot flourish in an alienated society and alienation can't be avoided when life is kept obsessed with production for production's sake and compressed within the weighted, time stressed limits of a complex, and thus necessarily hierarchical, technocratic exoskeleton.
Humanity cannot flourish in an alienated society and alienation can't be avoided when life is kept obsessed with production for production's sake ...
It is not enough just to remove government, or even to destroy corporate capitalism. The oppressive power of industrialism itself must also be vanquished. The most difficult truth in being free of this malignant force and its narcotic excretions, is that we each have to very rigorously review our own personal desires.
My purpose herein is not to exhaustively explain these genres, either in breadth or in part. The subject is too large and too interesting to compress. Hopefully I can provoke interest in looking beyond flawed familiarity and toward things that have been proven to work and which have been horribly suppressed. These two conditions are most likely not co-incidental.
A general reference:
Eco-anarchism:
For a diverse discourse upon the monster in the machine:
Two suitably orienting ones to begin with might be:
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