Speculative Non-Buddhism
Anarchism and its Aspirationsruins of the buddhist real
In the best spirit of anarchism, this seminar will strive to create a space of learning together, drawing from our shared understandings and experiences. It will explore anarchism as an ethical compass, which points simultaneously to an overarching critique of all forms of hierarchy and an expansive social vision of what it could mean to be free people in a free society. It will look at how anarchism can offer a way of thinking —a critical or dialectical theory—to find “cracks in the wall.” And from there, crucially, it will dig into anarchism as a living, breathing, prefigurative politics, utilizing illustrations from messy-beautiful experiments in the here and now that at once gesture toward a liberatory, loving world. At its heart, this seminar will revolve around what it means to aspire toward and practice an “everyday anarchism,” where notions such as self-organization and self-governance, mutual aid and solidarity, autonomy and collectivity, dignity and care, to name a few, become commonsensical second nature as well as the basis for new social relations and social organization.
Facilitator: Cindy Milstein. Cindy has long engaged in anarchistic organizing, contemporary social movements, and collective spaces, and is author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations, coauthor of Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism, and editor of the anthology Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism. Over the past couple years, they have focused on doing support for the J20 defendants and others facing state repression, co-organizing the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking’s Anarchist Summer School in Worcester, MA, and getting up to all sorts of “friendly anarchist” mischief as a collective member of Solidarity & Defense, Huron Valley in so-called Michigan. Cindy has also toured extensively this past year with their latest edited anthology, Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, speaking about the intimate connection between structural losses, grief, and resistance while holding space for similar stories, and is honored, called on, to do death doula and grief care. Cindy blogs at Outside the Circle.
(Click image below for podcast discussion with Cindy)
I’ve always been rather dubious of anarchism. How will you keep the trains running in an anarchist state? Engels, himself, asked this question in “On Authority”:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
“Authority … means: the imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand, authority presupposes subordination. Now, since these two words sound bad, and the relationship which they represent is disagreeable to the subordinated party, the question is to ascertain whether there is any way of dispensing with it…”
“Everywhere combined action, the complication of processes dependent upon each other, displaces independent action by individuals. But whoever mentions combined action speaks of organisation; now, is it possible to have organisation without authority?
“Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists… the land and the instruments of labour had become the collective property of the workers who use them. Will authority have disappeared, or will it only have changed its form?”
On the railway, “the co-operation of an infinite number of individuals is absolutely necessary, and this co-operation must be practised during precisely fixed hours so that no accidents may happen. Here, too, the first condition of the job is a dominant will that settles all subordinate questions… Moreover, what would happen to the first train dispatched if the authority of the railway employees over the Hon. passengers were abolished?”
“… a certain authority… are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make products circulate.”
“If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other”.
“The anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.”
Personally I find Engels’, “reproach it [Paris commune] for not having used it [killing] freely enough” really scary, a statement that prefigures Stalin’s terror. But his criticisms of anarchism seem valid.
So, all in all, I think we’re better off with democratic liberalism … at least you don’t have revolutionary figures shooting down shop owners & landlords, etc., and at least the trains run (mostly) on time. Revolutionary socialists and anarchists are, of course, fringe figures who have shown themselves to be unattractive to the vast majority of voters in Western democracies over the last hundred years… people don’t like to be shot at, and want the trains to run on time, i.e., the status quo.
Of course liberal governments need to keep better control of shopkeepers and landlords so they don’t overly exploit their shoppers & tenants… but that can happen in a liberal democracy (think of the British post-war Labour government that built lots of council houses and the NHS…)
So anarchists and socialists need to redirect their efforts to helping people like Bernie Saunders (USA) and Jeremy Corbyn (UK) get into power – people who will apply some control to the slumlords, and other capitalists, without shooting them, and many others, and who will keep the (nationalised) trains running on time and the (well taxed) factories working efficiently.
Hi Mal.
“I’ve always been rather dubious of anarchism.”
Really? Which classical and contemporary theorists are you referring to? Which have you read?
“How will you keep the trains running in an anarchist state?”
You’ll have to vote for the fascists, Mal. At least that’s what Mussolini said: vote for me and I’ll keep the trains running, and on time! And, after having the first few station masters shot–behold!–he was right! Another alternative, the anarchist one, is to teach cooperation and the necessity for shared, mutual aid to children, and the running of trains will follow.
“Engels, himself, asked this question in ‘On Authority'”
Using Engels to validate your, what, vague impression?, of anarchism, is like using a long quote by John Maynard Keynes to validate your disagreement with Richard Wolff. Marxist hostility toward anarchists and vice versa goes back to the First International. Bakunin argued that if Marx ever saw his system realized it would be as a totalitarian state. He said this because of what he perceived as the inherently pernicious nature of unjustified authority circulating in Marx’s ideas. The key term here is unjustified. Who would be against a justified assertion of authority in any given situation? A basic principle of anarchist thought is that states operate–exert a monopoly on control and violence–without rightful authority to do so. You might say, well, governments are elected. This would bring us back to your first point: all evidence suggests that we should be “dubious” about all of it. Even democracy doesn’t work.
Never understood anarchism. It’s one of those interesting ideologies.
Hi Keith. I personally believe that anarchism makes the most sense when we first consider it as an ethics for living, rather than as a macro-political intervention. Here’s a good place for information: https://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html