I’m currently reading Žiga Vodovnik’s A Living Spirit of Revolt: The Infrapolitics of Anarchism. The title comes from a quote from Emma Goldmann in 1969:
Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future.… It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions.… Anarchism does not stand for military drill and uniformity; it does, however, stand for the spirit of revolt, in whatever form, against everything that hinders human growth. All Anarchists agree in that, as they also agree in their opposition to the political machinery as a means of bringing about the great social change.
This is a strong part of what draws me to anarchism. There’s something largely apophatic about it. To borrow a phrase from early in the book, anarchism says every ‘no’ for the sake of many (undefined) yeses.
Part of that apophatic face makes it good at calling bullshit. And its more prominent voice can be pretty harshly so. Howard Zinn’s brief introduction to Vodovnik is a bitchin’ example. Here’s a sample (emphasis added):
The institution of capitalism, anarchists believe, is destructive, irrational, inhumane. It feeds ravenously on the immense resources of the earth, and then churns out (this is its achievement—it is an immense stupid churn) huge quantities of products. Those products have only an accidental relationship to what is most needed by people,because the organizers and distributors of goods care not about human need; they are great business enterprises motivated only by profit. Therefore, bombs, guns, office buildings, and deodorants take priority over food, homes, and recreation areas. Is there anything closer to “anarchy” (in the common use of the word, meaning confusion) than the incredibly wild and wasteful economic system in America?
I have generally been, and remain, fairly ambivalent about “capitalism.” There are good defenders and terrible ones. And there are good critics and there are terrible ones. Often, the defenders of capitalism are describing a system which we do not, in fact, have. (As Chesterton put it, Private Enterprise is as utopian a notion as Utopia itself.) And it is also true that the maladies of the western world, or even its greed alone, cannot be summed up, and are often lazily and partisanly avoided, by talking about something called capitalism.
At the same time, however, it can’t be wrong, and in fact must be a truth-telling requirement, to admit that the products of that system we call capitalism — products of which we both happily enjoy and needlessly consume — are, as far as the system goes, only ever accidentally related to love, care, and genuine human satisfaction while being derived from a process that is wildly and needlessly destructive of many things in the course of its “churn.”
A lot of us, and especially those of us who grew up on the Right, were more or less indoctrinated trained (sometimes for understandable reasons) to react as though this kind of criticism could only ever come from the Soviet Union. (And don’t get me started about the flip flop.) The result has not only been that so much needed criticism is swept under the political rug, but that it is swept under the mental rug, precluding the ability to think about, let alone provide, that needed criticism at all.
We need to be better critics. We don’t necessarily need to be anarchists (in the proper, radical egalitarian sense, not the lawless caricature), but we could certainly gain from hearing what they have to say.
Anarchism, however, so far as I have read it, knows it cannot follow its own critique, like Zinn’s above, with an alternative systematic vision — and it does not want to, because a systematic vision is precisely what anarchism opposes.
Of course it’s true that we need to know what we are for, not merely what we are against. But for a lot of life, it really is enough to know where and when simply to say no, even if the various and often conflicting yeses that we are looking for remain unclear or unknown.
Avoiding stupidity and avoiding what you know causes harm, and refusing, wherever possible, to participate in those things — this is not nothing. Because in the midst of all those nos always remains a human soul, a walking, talking imago Dei capable at any moment of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These do not need a system or a political party or an army.
And in a world filled to the brim with power, exploitation, and hypocrisy, a righteously placed ‘no’ might often be exactly what is needed. If we denounce the bad while praising the everyday, chaotic love and goodness we find wild in the world… well, this is probably the most normal way to be human. It’s not a utopian vision or a project looking for completion but an ideal sentiment, a banner to be held aloft wherever you are.
There are many more things to say, but that’s a good start on a topic I’ve wanted to broach.