But rebuilding community within globalism’s decline offers a way out
“We don’t fully understand why this is happening.” – Emily Brignone PhD, Highmark Health, Pittsburgh, PA
In 2017, studies conducted by a husband & wife research team made a brief wave in the national media when they documented “deaths of despair” — deaths due to alcoholism, drug overdose, dietary problems, and direct suicide — particularly among white Americans over age 50. Interestingly, this original study documented more despair in white people than people of color, with the described demographic being remarkably similar to how we often think of Trump voters — “White, middle-aged, undereducated, rural residents…” These people were “experiencing a substantial increase in mortality related to self-destructive behavior as opposed to others in different geographical, educational, and racial groups.”
In 2020 a new and larger study confirmed & expanded the findings, revealing that the symptoms have spread and increased among all age groups and sexes, and that in the past 10 years, drug and alcohol misuse and suicidal behaviors have increased across the board for men and women in all age groups. The researchers added that while it’s early to tell, increased isolation, unemployment, and other stresses from COVID-19 likely have compounded such effects. As is typical these days, there was a lot of arm waving about what to do about such an overwhelming problem; offered solutions invariably involve treatment, both medical and social, and include worthy words like “outreach” and “intervention” and “hard conversations.” Below are assorted quotes from authors and media about the studies:
“How do we show up where they are — at schools, churches, neighborhoods?”
“We have to look at how to embrace the hard conversations around mental health and addiction. We need to know how to talk to each other, and be empathetic and supportive.”
“We have to improve outreach to people in need and remove barriers to care…”
I reflect often on this type of post-hoc “treatment” approach to societal solutions, because it is one-of-a-part with the reformist (as opposed to systemic) remedies that usually comprise the liberal mindset; the idea being that, yes, society and capitalism suck, but if we vote and remain vigilant, we can correct the shortcomings. A week or two ago I attended a highly-publicized local workshop on drug overdoses in our small city, which has seen a huge-fold increase in overdose deaths in 2021 due to fentanyl (11 deaths since Aug. 1 2021 alone). Speakers, several of whom had experienced tragic family deaths due to overdoses, mostly offered post-hoc solutions, not dissimilar in tone to those above in the studies of deaths of despair:
“Let’s have more dialogue at home; let’s start raising our kids to have strong character and coping skills, so when the worst day of their life occurs they don’t run for an oxycontin.”
“Let’s expect for our schools and our educators to start pushing for this stuff in their curriculum too.”
“Give them coping skills and tools, and counselors, and more social workers… that’s awesome, let’s keep that going.”
One speaker almost got it; he said that “unfortunately we’ve been looking at the back end of substance abuse disorders for the last 25 or 30 years; we wait until the disease is set, and then try to figure out what to do;” in other words, he suggested that the treatment solutions we offer now, while helpful and necessary, are too late. As he said this, I reflected that 25 or 30 years ago is actually pretty recent history, only the 1990s; and that recreational drug use had been firmly in place in American society decades before that, since at least the mid-1960s, coming into mass public awareness by the late 1960s. In 1968, my usual 8th-grade Social Studies class was interrupted for a film called “Marijuana” narrated by Sonny Bono (former husband and abuser of Cher), wherein Bono talked over & over about how marijuana was a dangerous gateway to other bad drugs; he assured the children watching that the “hard choice” about drug use was up to us, but the message was clear that marijuana led down a deadly and dangerous road.1 Over 30 years later, by the 1990s, my daughter attended the Columbia public school anti-drug DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program (eliminated in 2009), which was given locally by the popular & charismatic police officer John Warner; DARE worked on “strengthening children’s refusal skills so they can better resist social pressures to try and use drugs” — in other words, saying NO to drugs. Some twenty years after that, here we were having yet another discussion about the dangers of drug abuse.
It is striking that most Americans can’t see choices outside of the institutions that they have grown up with, and it’s hard to blame them for that; as a result, over and over, the options proffered by liberals and centrists2 are to vote, vote, vote, to write their congressperson, and to have those “hard conversations.”3 The problem is that the system — the nation-state and the neoliberal economic system that guards it — are huge and pervasive, and their actions and power are all encompassing, like the weather. The overall effect is that many of us are forced to lead, essentially, meaningless lives; lives with limited community connection, lives employed in bullshit jobs — or worse, lives circumscribed by medical and college debt — all of which we compensate for by self-medication that in turn leads to deaths of despair.
My question to those who accept the current system would be: how do we vote away meaninglessness? How do we de-legislate the neoliberal economic system that has resulted in decades of working-class wage stagnation and exaggerated wealth inequalities to such extremes? How do we unconsolidate the huge school systems that arose in the past 80 years which, while saving tax money, have resulted in socially-disconnected & alienated young people, who are arguably more prone to drug use, and maybe even school shootings, because of such alienation? Can we really shop our way to a new and fairer economy? Can we really recycle our way out of environmental degradation? How do we undo the self-medicatory ravages of opioid addiction, obesity, and alcoholism — resulting in deaths of despair — that seem so pervasive now? While post-hoc remedies like education, coping skills, and “dialogue” are certainly necessary, the country has already fumbled these tools, without success, for many decades. If one steps back to look at the big picture, one might say that in this moment we are strung out on the end of a long, long journey, one in which each of the many fingers of modern life extend useless, flailing dead ends. Is this the “late-stage capitalism” people talk about on social media? Or perhaps this is the playing out of the “internal contradictions” of capitalism of which Marx & Engels spoke?
While the Biden election has bought time4, I firmly believe that there is no way to somehow “compromise” or “build consensus” to get ourselves out of the situation that faces us. I am aware that mine may be an extreme view, but offer instead that there are two choices for us: one, authoritarianism — undergirded and fed by the amorphous fear that embodies our times — will surely continue to emerge, even if temporarily, if the current trend of the Republican party to embrace Trumpism continues. If not stopped or eroded, this process will result in the US becoming something like a modern version of 1980s Argentina or Chile.
The other looming possibility is a more gradual and larger societal decline or collapse; something like what we saw during COVID-19 but longer, slower, and something that happens in the context of global warming. Paradoxically, provided we are able to save ourselves from the elemental forces that have existed in America from the beginning and which now seem to be massing inside the border, such a decline offers us the special chance to build a nurturing localism in our respective communities.
If nothing else, surely community is the one lesson we got from the Covid pandemic: we learned about taking care of neighbors, we relearned how to cook, we learned about growing front-yard victory gardens, about participating in mutual aid; in short, we gained insight about what community looks like. From anarchist David Graeber, in an essay he wrote shortly before he died in 2020:
“…we are a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another… those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated, and a very large proportion of the population don’t do anything at all but spin fantasies, extract rents, and generally get in the way of those who are making, fixing, moving, and transporting things, or tending to the needs of other living beings. It is imperative that we not slip back into a reality where all this makes some sort of inexplicable sense, the way senseless things so often do in dreams.”
Footnotes 1. Sonny Bono later joked that he was high on pot during the entire filming of the movie. 2. “These debates remain trapped within a fundamentally liberal view of history in which it is impossible to move beyond each group’s story of their struggle against oppressive forces. This can be seen as a form of identity politics in historical thinking and, as many Marxists have pointed out, identity politics in fact neatly reproduces the pluralistic liberal ideology that has emerged to represent the ruling factions of our contemporary ruling class.” White, J., Making our own History, 2021 3. Hard conversations with whom, I sometimes wonder? How often outside of social media do most of us really interact with those having opinions exactly the opposite of our own? These people for the most part don’t live in our neighborhoods; does a yelling match with an intractable father-in-law at Thanksgiving constitute a “hard conversation?” Such a conversation could be “hard” as in unpleasant, certainly, but how often does either party reassess their viewpoint or truly take consideration of another’s? 4. Although some liberals seem to think that the January 6th Capitol sacking marked the beginning of an end to the power of the far-right in the US, history shows that nations only unite in condemnation when the cumulative results & consequences of rightist activities lead to almost overwhelming and pervasive societal fatigue or societal collapse; witness Germany after World War II and the United States after the twin ravages of Vietnam and Watergate.
Author Andrew Tanner descibes himself as a “researcher, cat devotee, and autistic true neutral pro-science anti-authoritarian Pacific American, if you must have categories.” He has written two pieces for Medium on what he calls the death of “Fourth America.” While I don’t agree with all of his extrapolated predictions, his base analysis is sound, and worthy of attention.
Tanner’s recent articles are sobering pieces based on a June 2021 survey by Bright Line Watch, a research group of scholars who monitor American democratic norms and institutions. Bright Line’s survey found, among other things, that a “distressingly” high proportion of those polled responded positively to secession from the United States, in favor of new unions within their respective regions. Bright Line constructed five hypothetical unions: Pacific, Mountain, “Heartland,” South, and Northeast; while they cautioned that the “survey item reflects initial reactions by respondents about an issue that they are very unlikely to have considered carefully,” they found that across all averaged regions, an average 37% of respondents — whether Democrats in the Northeast or Republicans in the South and Midwest — were willing to secede. Bright Line had conducted a similar survey in January-February 2021, immediately after the January 6th Capitol uprising, and found it surprising that — rather than a diminishment of secessionist ardor after the passage of time following the Trump administration — there were instead increases in all surveyed groups, including the subordinate groups (e.g., Democrats in the south) within each region.
Tanner starts the article by outlining the truth of a number of validated predictions he made since the rise of Trump in 2016 — that Trump would win the general election, that the Mueller investigation would be a big nothing, that 2020 would repeat the claims of election subversion that led up to 2016 (the latter not a surprise to anyone who watched Trump’s behavior prior to November 2016). Tanner then outlines a temporal series of operationally-defined “Four Americas” — times when America died and became reborn: Colonial (1619-1776), Founder’s America (1776-1861), Imperial America (1865-1945), and Fourth America (1945-present).
“Fourth America is collapsing as the postwar global international order decays, the digital generations — Xers, Millennials, and Zoomers — become the majority, and wealth inequality within and between nations reaches the same extreme levels they did back in the Gilded Era, during Third America before the Great Depression.”
Evidence for decline, says Tanner, should be obvious, and includes basically everything we see argued about on social media, from mass shootings, goods and services declines, evictions and housing shortages, debt, disease, and climate disaster; “If you go back and look at the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the pattern should jump right out at you,” says Tanner. “The country is falling apart, and the billionaires and political hacks running the show are selling inadequate solutions. Linear treatments to exponentially growing problems.”
I couldn’t agree more, at least with this part. Tanner predicts that the 2024 elections will again feature Donald Trump, that they will be acrimonious, and that the results will be brutal.
Again, I agree; in fact, the only thing one might disagree with is Tanner’s assessment that anything as rational as regional succession might result from the mess. Whereas Tea Partiers were once functional only at local or regional scales, the Republican establishment realizes they now have to elevate such interests to a national game. Republicans — who for decades under establishment leaders like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell could get elected with patronizing nods to conspiracy-minded regional voters as long as they could ignore them once in office — have shown that they are no longer willing to do this, with only 6 Senate Republicans (not including McConnell) voting to condemn Trump for his role in facilitating the Capitol riot — with those voting against the condemnation having it both ways by voting against it for “procedural” reasons.
The effort for a sensible succession must be preemptive, Tanner insists; it must happen before the next election, rather than as a post-election embroilment wherein the military might be forced to take sides: “…worse, the armed forces could fracture, creating warring factions within the wreckage of America. This would fast escalate to ethnic cleansing…” Ethnic cleansing is a valid concern; as a liberatory community defense organization concerned with marginalized populations, it’s the basis of why many of us joined this club; conflicts like these are things that we, perhaps like Tanner, have been warning about for years. If nothing else, surely the riots by the far right, attempted takeovers of state capitols, and the sacking of the national capitol should finally convince the liberals in the audience that such possibilities are no longer far fetched.
Where I disagree is that something as sensible as voluntary governmental succession through constitutional amendment, as Tanner proposes, could even occur:
“The Constitution must be Amended to split the federal government into at least five, if not eight, Autonomous Federal Regions made by states self-grouping…. Each AFR must be given the existing Constitution, all the federal laws and bureaucratic rules and caselaw, and invested with the right to interpret and further amend it according to the will of the regional electorate… ALL existing federal roles except declaring war and maintaining a common currency and the right of travel between regions will be ported down to the new sub-federal governments. This includes military formations.”
Hmm. Well, something as proactive as succession seems extremely optimistic, because (one) similar to most insurrections and revolutions in history, social forces thus far being restrained will be too powerful once unleashed, and (two) because the groundwork for orderly succession (or succession as anything other than an indignant show-boating regional response to perceived wrongs) has not been laid in any rationally conversational way; the media, the politicians in Washington, and society at-large as yet have no framework for such a sensible consideration.
As a believer in localism — not based on ethnic or regional similarities and differences, but for democratic reasons based on community logistics and needs — Tanner’s vision suggests a start, but just seems too unlikely and far-fetched. It seems much more likely that societal factioning will lead to continued decline and dysfunction in the best case (disruptions from climate, economics, disease; problems in food, healthcare and shelter procurement; the concomitant rise in authoritarianism — arguably, these are already here) — and collapse in the worst.
In the event of the latter, the 2nd-best we might hope for after Tanner’s vision [1], is the creation of semi-sustainable democratic autonomous zones similar to places like Chiapas or North & East Syria. Communities having a preponderance of healthy grassroots activists, community-defense groups, and local food initiatives, such as Columbia, Missouri, already have in place the ingredients to build such a vision; the components just need to be oriented away from individualism and consumership (at least in the case of most food initiatives as they are now) and towards a liberatory, non-elitist and participatory cooperation.
Given everything, while one can disagree with the likelihood of implementation of the succession scenario Tanner has built from the Bright Line Group surveys, the underlying concerns he has made explicit are worthy of concern.
“Powerful forces have been unleashed,” Tanner says, “and events are preceding as they must.”
Footnotes 1. While a group of smaller “nations” based on the Bright Line Group’s surveys divisions might be a promising start to creation of local democratic structures, even smaller bodies, especially the right-oriented groupings, could ultimately take on any of the negative qualities inherent in nation states.
From an Anarchism to a Democratic Confederalism, Part IV
By Everett Acorn
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the anarchist concepts of a balanced community, a face-to-face democracy, a humanistic technology, and a decentralized society—these rich libertarian concepts are not only desirable but necessary. Not only do they belong to the great visions of man’s future; they now constitute the preconditions for human survival.
Murray Bookchin, 1964
A core idea of the ‘new paradigm’ is the idea that Kurds should not seek to establish a state of their own, but should instead fight for a political system which embraces the cultural and political rights of all people. This approach aims to avoid the danger of reproducing the oppression of one people by another through the system of the nation-state. The shared values and principles of a society are seen as more important than the ethnicity of the people living in it.
Rojava Information Center, 2019
If one had told almost anyone who wasn’t part of the Kurdish movement in 2010 that by 2015 there would be an armed feminist uprising demanding direct democracy across a significant swath of the Middle East, they would probably thought you were insane. Yet there is.
David Graeber, 2016
In 2006, Abdullah Öcalan was living on an island off the coast of Turkey, where he had been held prisoner — at that time, its only prisoner — since 1999. Öcalan was a founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in 1978. Born in southeast Turkey and educated at university in Ankara, Öcalan started as a Marxist-Leninist guerilla leader in classic Che Guevara mode, but by the late 1990s had undergone a transformation: “He had concluded that Marxism was authoritarian and dogmatic and unable to creatively approach current problems,” wrote author & artist Janet Biehl. The PKK, Öcalan said, “must give up its goal of achieving a separate Kurdish state and adopt a democratic program for Turkey as a whole.” Ironically, just as Öcalan began this less militaristic shift, Turkey, which controls the water supply to Syria, began to close in, threatening a water shutoff and armed action against Syria if Öcalan and the PKK were not turned in. Syria started to break up the PKK camps, and so began an international flight for freedom which ended in Öcalan being apprehended in Kenya 1999, reportedly with the help of Isralei and U.S security. Sentenced to death, his sentence was only commuted because of the precondition of death penalty abolition for Turkey’s admission to the EU.
In 2002, while imprisoned, Öcalan had begun reading the work of Murray Bookchin. A child of Jewish Russian immigrants who had been active in the revolution, from an early age Bookchin was immersed in the Communist youth movement, but by the late 1930s became disillusioned by Stalin and was expelled from the party after the Stalin-Hitler pact of September 1939 for “Trotskyist-anarchist deviations.” Working as a foundryman, he became involved with unions and strikes, but after the war his outlook changed, as the massive workers’ revolts Trotsky had predicted failed to materialize, and GM workers in 1948 accepted a contract forbidding them from going on strike [1]. Bookchin realized “once and for all that [the working-class] was not revolutionary… Having been a Marxist since the age of nine, the realisation came as a shock… Bookchin’s community collapsed around him. The party had failed him; his grandmother died; the Cross-Bronx Expressway, built by the city planner Robert Moses, ripped through East Tremont, displacing five thousand people.”
However, while the specific prediction under Marxism about a working class revolution did not materialize, the underlying Marxist premise about disruptive capitalist forces — forces leading to disharmony and eventual collapse & revolution — remained valid. At its base, Marx and Engels saw that the internal contradictions of capitalism would result in pressures that would ultimately destroy capitalism itself. Formulating their theories in the booming industrial age of the mid-1800s, Marx & Engels logically saw these processes culminating in revolts by oppressed proletariat workers; one hundred years later it would be only natural for capitalism’s internal contradictions to manifest in a way that Marx & Engels could not have anticipated. Where others resigned from the movement after the war, Bookchin remained, convinced that capitalism was inherently flawed and self-destructive, exploring how these internal contradictions might play out. He eventually realized that capitalist forces would manifest their harm most on the natural environment; capitalism…
…industrialized agriculture, tainting crops and by extension people with toxic chemicals; it inflated cities to unbearably large, megalopolitan size, cut off from nature, that turned people into automatons and damaged both their bodies and their psyches. It pressured them through advertising to spend their money on useless commodities, whose production further harmed the environment. The crisis of capitalism, then, would result not from the exploitation of the working class but from the intolerable dehumanization of people and the destruction of nature.
There’s nothing revelatory about this to us in 2021, but recall that this was the 1950s, several decades before Earth Day and even before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. In fact, Bookchin’s 1962 book about the dangerous re-purposing of wartime chemicals, Our Synthetic Environment, preceded publication of Silent Spring by 6 months, but was dismissed by critics (“No one is going to stop the world so that someone who would like to get off will be able to,” a New York Times reviewer said). Nobody captures the essence of these ideas better than Bookchin’s companion and collaborator Janet Biehl:
To create an ecological society, cities would have to be decentralized, so people could live at a smaller scale and govern themselves and grow food locally and use renewable energy. The new society would be guided, not by the dictates of the market, or by the imperatives of a state authority, but by people’s decisions. Their decisions would be guided by ethics, on a communal scale.
Both the revolutionary organization and the institutions for the new society would have to be truly liberatory, so they would not lead to a new Stalin, to yet another tyranny in the name of socialism. Yet they would have to be strong enough to suppress capitalism.
Those institutions… could only be democratic assemblies. The present nation-state would have to be eliminated and its powers devolve to citizens in assemblies. They, rather than the masters of industry, could make decisions, for example about the environment. And since assemblies only worked in a locality, in order to function at a broader geographical area, they would have to band together—to confederate.
Bookchin called this program libertarian municipalism, later using the word communalism; at its heart was the human need for individualism — not in the selfish sense, but in the sense of freedom to realize one’s potential, an individualism driven by its connection to community (rather than by alienation to society, as exemplified in the “rugged individualist”) — and localism, as opposed to globalism, similar to that envisioned by Helena Norberg-Hodge in the previous essay in this series. Its mechanisms were citizens’ assemblies, such as those found in Mesopotamia, classical Greece, revolutionary France and America, and New England — and confederation, so that the different citizens’ assemblies could “speak” to one another.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, following several decades of armed struggle for a Kurdish state, Öcalan and others [2] were arriving at a similar place; as mentioned above, Öcalan now believed that democracy was the key, and that rather than pushing for Kurdish statehood, this democracy needed to happen within the extant Turkish state apparatus; the Turks couldn’t call themselves a democracy without the Kurds, he said. The conditions of his confinement didn’t prevent him from getting in touch with Murray Bookchin through intermediaries, but by this time, 2004, Bookchin was 83 years old and in poor health. “I beg you to understand,” Bookchin wrote to Öcalan, “that I am … very frail. I can no longer sit before a word processor for hours and write articles or even letters … I am obliged to spend much of my time in bed. As such, I am not in a position to carry on an extensive theoretical dialogue…”
But Öcalan stayed in communication with the ailing Bookchin and refined his vision of an inclusive democracy, advocating for the ground-up approach of Bookchin instead of so-called representative democracy. In a 1987 book titled The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship, Bookchin had found a model for the society he envisioned in the traditional inland communities of New England. Separated from the acquisitive capitalism that emerged from port cities like Boston or Providence, New England villages, over several hundreds of years, developed what Bookchin called an adherence to ”yeoman values,” a community-oriented culture, a “moral economy and society” that prioritized “essentials over frivolities, fairness and mutuality in relationships, egalitarianism in status, self-sufficiency in the development of needs and their satisfaction.” The authentic unit of political life, Bookchin stressed, was the village, the municipality — humanly scaled — or “its various subdivisions, notably the neighborhood.” When it came to governance, the ethos of New England’s nonhierarchical Congregationalist church informed the direct democracy of the New England town meeting; rather than municipal assemblies having a bureaucratic professional class of mayors & councilmen, the New England town meeting was a direct democracy. Theoretically, any assembly system in any location could similarly be composed of rotatable & recallable & accountable delegates; it was a “‘referendum’ form of politics… based on a social contract to share decision making with the population at large and abide by the rule of the majority…” Even cities could be governed in such a way; “no city, in fact, is so large that it cannot be networked for political purposes,” Bookchin wrote.
Crucial in adapting the platform for modern use was the concept of dual power — sometimes considered a transitional space in revolutionary theory — wherein grassroots efforts by local assemblies and their outputs ultimately make the need for the state obsolete. In the context of Rojava, Öcalan and other Kurds saw that there was room for both remnants of the state (“The YPG/J could easily take over the airport. But what would be the point?”) and governance via something like Bookchin’s local citizens’ assembly. The confederal democracy’s congresses should solve problems “that the state cannot solve single-handedly…” A limited state could coexist with the democracy, “in parallel,” Öcalan said. It is easy to see dual power as the logical extension of the mutual aid extolled by anarchists of the 19th century — that is, a voluntary reciprocal exchange of services among consenting individuals, made necessary because of the failures of traditional government (the state) in the first place.
And so was to begin the effort in what was first Rojava, now extended and called the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), in the northern region of Kurdistan Syria, to create on-the-ground governance based on the writings of a Vermont-based Jewish anarchist senior citizen. But it was not to occur without the intervention of serious external obstacles, which, as has often happened, simultaneously & paradoxically created the vacuum of opportunity that allowed such an anarchist-informed system to unfold.
Civil War in Syria
With the arrival of the “Arab Spring” in 2011, large-scale civil war took place in Syria, with the Kurds making up a “third force” in the conflict. In 2012 the YPJ/YPG (women and men’s forces of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units) took control of Kobani, the centrally-located city of the three cantons of Rojava; soon, Derik and Afrin were liberated. Syrian regime troops were not captured or detained, but offered the option of simply returning home, and buildings that had belonged to the state became people’s houses or cultural centers. But by 2013 ISIS arose in the region, taking advantage of the disorder created by civil war and capturing large cities like Mosul and Raqqa; in 2014, they attacked Kobani, with the goal of taking over all of Kurdish northern Syria. Surrounded by ISIS on three sides, the YPJ/YPG asked the international community only for a corridor for safe passage of food and medications, but Turkey refused to provide it. “To many, IS [ISIS] seemed unstoppable… the Erodogan government predicted that Kobani would fall, as did the US Secretary of State John Kerry.” While the Syrian civil war was prominent news with images of the ruins of Aleppo pervasive in the media, the democratic revolution taking place within in the war went by largely unnoticed, even by leftists; all of that changed in 2015 when the YPJ/YPG expelled ISIS from Kobani in northern Syria, beginning the decline of ISIS in the region and in a 6-month siege and liberation finally noted by the press (and as written about recently by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon in the book Daughters of Kobani).
The Importance of Women
“We’ve learned from the failed revolutions in the past. They always said, ‘let’s carry the revolution to success, and then we’ll give women their rights’. But after the revolution, of course it didn’t happen. We’re not repeating that old story in our revolution.”
In his studies of the rise of ancient civilisation, Öcalan became convinced that the rise from simple communalism to the repressive patriarchal nation state was accompanied everywhere by the subjugation of women; thus, he said, women needed to be at the center of the revolution, even as Kurdish men were arrested and detained en mass during the 1990s and the revolution became dependent upon the work of women. Underage marriages, forced marriages, spousal abuse, and patriarchal control of women, heretofore all contained in varying degrees in various parts of the regional ethos, were now forbidden, while women’s education and community participation were encouraged; over time (although not without challenges) these changes manifested themselves into acceptability as a cultural shift. Dual leadership — both women and men as heads of committees and organizations — and 40% membership by women was required of all administrative and organizational bodies; prior to the Turkish invasion and as of 2016 in Afrin, membership in such bodies was 65% women.
The Basis: People’s Councils
Upon the Syrian uprising in 2011, the first revolutionary effort was to implement people’s councils (citizens’ assemblies), the types of direct-democratic assemblies that Bookchin wrote about; the goal was to create, in dual-power form, structures parallel to the state. Knapp et al. in Revolution in Rojava indicate that as early as August 2011 over half of Rojava’s Kurds were organized into councils. Where initial neighborhood councils might be too large and inexperienced to deal with the initial surge of local problems in the absence of the state, so local communes arose at the level of the street. What ultimately materialized was a bottom-up council system:
The commune — essentially, a street, or perhaps a small village; the smallest unit and the basis for democratic autonomy; these are analogous to the “pods” currently described in the US in the contexts of home-schooling and Covid19 mutual-aid groups. Each commune has a “people’s house” open 24 hours a day for meetings and concerns. Most communes also have a women’s house as a focal point for women’s self governance. A commune has a coordinating board of two co-chairs (one woman and one man) who are subject to recall if they don’t meet the needs of the council. In late 2015 there were up to 500 communes in the city of Quamislo (population ~184,000).
The neighborhood — in towns, comprising 7-to-30 communes, in the countryside, perhaps 7-to-10 villages; the neighborhood council is made up of the coordinator co-chairs mentioned above, whose responsibility is directly back to their commune. Neighborhood commissions (see below) and co-chairs are created.
The Subdistrict and District — essentially the suburbs and/or the city, made up of representatives from all of Neighborhood councils and commissions. This is where parties, such as the PYD (Party of Democratic Unity) enter the system and can have membership. Knapp et al. say that there are usually 100-200 activists in the District People’s Council, and that this group too forms commissions and elects accountable co-chiefs.
The Canton (subregions), formerly just Afrin, Kobane, and Cizîrê (pronounce Jazeera), now including the new Arab cantons that joined in 2017;
The Region (now seven all together); finally,
The Autonomous Administration of North East Syria (AANES) coordinates among all the regions.
While the AANES (established in 2018) coordinates among the seven regions, another organizational body, the TEV-DEM (established in 2011) is an “umbrella body for civil society, supporting, coordinating and ensuring that the voice of civil society is fed into the political and administrative aspects of the system. It acts as a kind of ‘counter-power’ to the Autonomous Administration.” Finally, the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) is where political parties enter the system, is made up of all the ethnicities of the region, “represents all the components of North and East Syria” and coordinates activities with the rest of northeastern Syrian society outside of the Autonomous system. The SDC thus works toward democratic confederalism within Syria outside of the AANES and internationally, with offices in Washington, Vienna, in other parts of the world, and even met with US congressmen in 2019 following the Turkish invasion. Undergirding everything is a Social Contract, analogous to a constitution; it affirms basic rights and gender equality.
The Rojava Information Center’s own document refers to the AANES, TEV-DEM, and SDC as “higher levels,” but I think this is a misnomer, since the crucial distinction about this non-representative system is that it is direct; the commune of citizens is arguably the “highest level” of administration, the other levels being composed of delegates obligated to the decisions of the commune and its committees. At the commune level there are a possible nine committees: defense, education, reconciliation and justice, the women’s committee, youth and sports, health, families of the martyrs, arts and culture, and the economy committee. Women’s committees have a special status, and men are not part of their decisions; members visit local women in their homes and facilitate their engagement in local work. For the defense committee, three people are elected as representatives for each commune (think of your street block in Columbia MO); if a neighborhood or district (city) is attacked, the local defense committee is the first line of defense, even before the YPJ/YPG or the Asayish (AANES security/police forces). The economics committee makes sure that “all adults have a livelihood and can support themselves and their dependents” and is concerned with commodities and food supply. Other commissions function in their respectively-named roles, sometimes in overlap with each other; not all communes have all nine committees
As indicated above, by 2016, the project had grown from 3 to 7 regions to include Arab-majority regions and Manbij, Tabqa, Raqqa and Deir-ez-Zor to the south and east, and the name for the confederation was changed from Rojava to AANES; “it is no longer an exclusively Kurdish project,” says the 2019 Rojava Information Center report, adding that in every region, councils and co-chairs include representation from not only Arabs but other ethnic groups: “the shift from organizing under the name ‘Rojava’ to ‘Northern Syria’ and subsequently ‘North and East Syria’ also indicates a vision which goes far beyond ethnic identity.” In early 2018 the westernmost canton of Afrin was invaded by Turkish forces and Turkish-backed Syrian forces; at first putting up a capable defense on the ground, the city of Afrin ultimately capitulated and evacuated after shelling and aerial bombardment. Turkey has been accused of changing Afrin’s Kurdish population from 85% to 20%, displacing them with some 2 million Sunni Arabs. Further east and near the Turkish border, Tel Abyad and Sere Kaniye were taken by Turkey by late 2019.
Has it worked, and is governance under democratic confederalism simple & easy? As they say in the self-help books, simple, yes; easy, no. At the large scale, the whole of northern Syria continues to be a place of conflict among many parties and alliances, including Turkey, Syria, the Soviet Union, ISIS, and the SDF (Syrian Defense Forces). A village exclusively for women and children near Dirbesiye, “where women alone develop the culture, economy, daily life and governance” and physically built the village, had to be evacuated due to nearby shelling during the Turkish invasion of 2019. At the level of the region, there can be cultural difficulties. While the Syrian government allows polygyny, the confederations’ Women’s Law of 2014 prohibits it; when the Arab region of Deir-ez-Zor was added to the confederation, the AANES had to use a “diplomatic approach,” in the words of the Rojava Information Center’s report, in working with some Arab tribes on the issue. At the level of the commune, direct democracy works better in some places than others; the 2019 Rojava Information Center document is frank, mentioning problems with “lack of education” and lack of understanding about the nature of the commune system stemming from a “lingering state mentality” and a long-standing culture of authoritarianism: “people are not used to seeing themselves as part of a political process; they are used to working within a system in which one person has power and others don’t.” Citizens will often view the co-chairs as new authorities who should provide services, instead of seeing them as mere co-ordinators for their own citizen initiatives. Citizenship is time consuming and the average involved citizen in an AANES commune might spend several nights a week in meetings; anyone in Columbia MO who participated in the months-long protests around the George Floyd incident can recall how many evenings of the week your life was taken up by nightly protests, meetings, and related events. On the opposite side of overwork, as activists everywhere have experienced, is the problem of non-participation from many citizens:
Currently, not enough people actively participate in the commune system for it to fulfill its function in terms of feeding democratic decisions up through the confederal system. Although the current cross-regional initiative to provide more education about the commune system will work towards addressing this, much more education and institutional support is needed.
There are also historical tensions between Arabs, Kurds, and other nationalities, and as mentioned, areas and situations in which rights for women are difficult to achieve.
On the positive side, however: the system is broadly established and becoming accepted; standards of living have improved; bread and diesel fuel have been provided for average citizens at the level of the commune; salaries have increased; students are now able to attend schools in multi-lingual education or their original language; electricity and water are available, and according to the Rojava Information Center’s 2019 report, access to basic goods in the autonomous zone is better than in nearly all other areas of Syria; and throughout the autonomous zone, the culture of violence and its attendant torture, disappearances and summary executions have been forbidden.
Can something like this be achieved in the US? Many might wonder, why bother, if things are working well enough for most people as is right now. Another criticism might be that something like democratic confederalism sounds great, but people in the US are too complacent to put something like this into place; the necessity just isn’t there. To the first criticism, I would say that for a county like Boone County Missouri, population 180,000, to record monthly visits at the food bank in the 5 figures — that is, at least 1/10th of the population — indicates that there is more daily need out there than the educated majority of our college town is largely aware. A 2021 report for the city of Columbia indicates a child poverty rate of 35%; the city has failed over decades to provide permanent shelter for the homeless population (although recent initiatives show promise), and problems remain with racial bias in traffic stops and housing, as well as ongoing disputes between rival groups that result in numerous deaths of young people every year. The second objection about complacency is something our club, with its mission for creating alternative structures and building strong communities, has encountered frequently, but which became real during the Covid19 lockdown of 2020 when the ability of government at all levels failed to address community needs. It is our strong view that as negative repercussions from globalism, such as climate change, disease pandemics, economic suffering, and the rise of authoritarianism, continue to be aggravated, that the environment for truly local solutions — localism — in cities like Columbia will open something in which a block-by-block model of something like a democratic confederalism could thrive.
In the first part of this series we emphasized that anarchism, rather than a lifestyle or attitude, is a socialism, both in the broad social sense of being an egalitarian system as well in the narrow economic sense of being a system of worker-owned enterprises; in the previous installment we engaged the concepts of globalism and localism through the work of Helena Norberg-Hodge; and in this installment we have tried to show how a system for localism has been operationally applied with success at regional scale. Questions remain: how could something like Democratic Confederalism be applied in a city of ~120,000, like Columbia Missouri? Under what social conditions could something like democratic confederalism be administered and what would be some obstacles to its implementation? Is a council of delegates from neighborhood councils, themselves delegates from councils at the level of the neighborhood block, really different from the system of elected city councilpeople and citizen review boards we have now, and if so, how? What about policing, security, and, as elemental racist forces in the United States continue to rise, community defense? We will try to examine these questions in the last part of this series.
Footnotes
[1] Trotsky (assassinated in Mexico in 1940) had predicted that the Second World War would end in massive workers’ revolts, but if it failed to do so, said that leftists would have to regroup and reassess.
[2] David Graeber has said that debates about the changes in the notion of a Kurdish state were in place before Öcalan was imprisoned (Knapp et al., p. XV).
From an Anarchism to a Democratic Confederalism, Part III
As face-to-face relationships deteriorate and real-life role models are replaced by distant, artificial images of perfection in mass media and in the hyperbolic world of social media, unhealthy comparison runs rife. These trends are associated with rising rates of disorders such as anorexia, anxiety, aggression and even suicide, while social isolation, domestic stress and increasing economic pressures have given rise to epidemics of depression and addiction.
Helena Norberg-Hodge
To many right now, the world in general and USA in particular have been an unholy sick place. Near the end of USA rule by a madman Nero-president, a worldwide virus takes hold; adults are forced to stay home from work and children home from school as everything from toilet paper to baker’s yeast vanishes from store shelves; citizens already struggling with everything from depression to obesity to addiction — a syndrome labelled “deaths of despair” by a team of researchers — see their problems compounded by isolation and fear; to top things off, the outcome of a presidential election, noncontroversial in any other epoch, results in the sacking of the nation’s capital by people who, for decades, were explicit about fomenting general insurrection, but who somehow surprised the people in charge.
Ironically, just as the pandemic eases, the one social ill in the USA seemingly mitigated by the Covid — mass shootings — re-emerges in force, as isolation restrictions vanish and things get back to… well, normal. With the change in politics, also returned to normal is liberal complacency, as the Obama-Biden fan club hastens a return to brunchy NPR culture; they look back on the 4 Trump years as a Duck-dynasty-fueled nightmare/anomaly that interrupted their cultural dream-bubble, and in doing so disconnect it from any historical and economic analysis that might possibly involve the educated liberal class, or might involve caring about an uneducated class who has been bypassed by capitalism and has been focused on the wrong enemy. To be fair, liberals probably realize it’s not necessarily over, as the right shows no signs of backing down, their only debate being on how best to integrate Trumpism without Trump, introducing a bevy of voter-repression schemes and fighting against the teaching of accurate history in K-12 schools (inaccurately labeled as “Critical Race Theory” to make it sound conspiratorial).
Despite the new face (actually, old face) in the executive office we are in the middle of a storm, and while we’re in it, it all seems too huge to understand, doesn’t it. I like this analogy of a storm; if you saw a tornado from far away, you’d know what it was, and you could even analyze it if you had the predisposition to do so; warm humid air is rising while cool air is falling, etc. But if you were in the middle of it, you might be pressed to understand what was happening all around you. I think that’s very much where we are at right now — we’re still in the middle, it’s big, and many of us can’t even tell that we are inside of it.
And it is huge, in fact, as the term “globalization” should suggest. Helena Norberg-Hodge, author of the book Ancient Futures (1991) and producer-director of the film The Economics of Happiness (2011), anticipated many of these developments, and was early in formulating a remedy. It’s something about which Norberg-Hodge should know, having lived in Ladakh, or Little Tibet in the Indian Himalayas, for over 4 decades. She arrived there just as the region opened up to tourism in 1975, but early enough to witness how things had been for centuries:
Although there was little money, there was no evidence of the kind of poverty one sees all over the so-called “developing” world — where people are hungry or malnourished, and have neither adequate shelter nor clean drinking water. In fact, throughout Ladakh I was told regularly: “We are tung-bos za-bos”, which means “we are self-sufficient, we have plenty to eat and drink”.
For the next twenty years I watched Leh turn into an urban sprawl. The streets became choked with traffic, and the air tasted of diesel fumes. “Housing colonies” of soulless, cement boxes spread into the dusty desert. The once pristine streams became polluted, the water undrinkable. For the first time, there were homeless people. The increased economic pressures led to unemployment and competition. Within a few years, friction between different communities appeared. All of these things had not existed for the previous 500 years.
Norberg-Hodge watched these changes occur simultaneously at several levels, as, over time, Bhuddists and Muslims who once got along began flaunting religion in each other’s faces. Food, no longer grown by the community but subsidized and imported through globalism’s gleaning of the world’s cheapest sources, made local farming uneconomic; no longer needing homegrown hands-on skills, people instead learned how to live in cities, as local culture was looked down upon and economic and political power were now centered in the capital instead of the household/village.
It was clear to me that the arrival of the global economy had created a pervasive sense of insecurity and disempowerment. On a practical level, the Ladakhis were becoming dependent on far-off manufacturers and centralised bureaucracies instead of on each other. Psychologically, they had lost confidence in themselves and their culture.
From there, the leap to authoritarianism is not a far one; “it is not hard to see how people who feel insecure and disempowered can turn to anger and extremism.” And Norberg-Hodge makes clear that, although she was in the right place at the right time to see the clear connection between globalization and societal decline/collapse, the process is one that all humans will endure, and its wake is the breeding grounds for authoritarianism; in keeping with the deterministic tenets of historical materialism, economics and survival drive changes in culture and politics.
Significantly, because of her immersion and perhaps because of her academic background (Norberg-Hodge was a grad student of Chomsky’s), Norberg-Hodge is firm about denying the ability of conventional (mainstream electoral) left or right politics to handle something so vast; the way to bring change “is not to simply vote for a new candidate within the same compromised political structure.” Rather, her remedy is a return to what she calls “localization” (I personally prefer the term “localism” for the movement and “localisation” for the process). To create localism, it is necessary to build a network of “face-to-face” local groups, to raise awareness about common interests, and to link divergent groups that retain “pro-democracy/anti-corporate” positions; in a 2018 paper, she speaks of seeing promise in La Via Campesina’s worldwide movement for local food sovereignty, and she sees promise in the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign.
We need to start talking politics with one another – with those concerned about social justice and peace, those focused on unemployment, environmental issues, or spiritual and ethical values.
Examples in places as diverse as Fitzroy, Australia, Vermont, USA, Preston and Oxfordshire UK, and Brazil showcase things like free exchanges, culturally-derived immigrant workshops, decentralized renewable energy infrastructure, and community banking with its own currency. Norberg-Hodge refers to initiatives that many of us in USA urban areas may already know well, including food-based efforts like community gardens, farmers’ markets, and CSAs, saying that these developments “attest[s] to the fact that more and more people are arriving, in a largely common-sense way, at localization as a systemic solution to the problems they face.”
Hmm. Well, yes and no. Perhaps it depends upon how class is framed in the solution; in my experience, the local food initiatives and the farmer’s markets, CSAs, and the food wagons that accompany them are informed more by an urban artisanal culture of connoisseurship than by desire for systemic revolution; while giving a nod to sustainability and environmental responsibility, this movement often seems more to reflect a wish by a privileged class to partake of a sensibility that includes an abhorrence of mass-produced things in general. For those who didn’t live through it, the idea that late-1950s and early-1960s mass-produced products like Tang were craved by a privileged middle class seems unbelievable, as today, products like heirloom tomatoes, hand-made beers, and things unbranded, homemade, and personalized take the place of regulated products mass-produced by standardization (which itself revolutionized the unhealthy and unregulated industry written about by Sinclair Lewis in The Jungle).
To be sure, there are good aspects of the artisanal culture, and aspects of it that already place it within a localistic framework; as anthropologist Grant McCracken has observed, transparency and authenticity are parts of this kind of production, and crucially, local sourcing is built into its ethos. This last aspect especially provides a template for elevating localism, from an artisanal culture based on aesthetics, to one based on human need as an organizing principle. Yes, modern artisanal culture’s components already include an awareness of the detriments of global industrialized production, as emphasized in Michael Pollan’s popular 2006 Omnivore’s Dilemma, but right now this awareness is more of an aside, analogous to saving the planet by using LED light bulbs (rather than saving it by removing the institutions that create superabundances of cheap consumer goods through exploitation of cheap overseas sources of labor and production).
Okay then, if localism (based on need, not sophistication) should be front-and-center in, say, an artisanal food movement, how do we implement it? Norberg-Hodge:
We need to start talking politics with one another – with those concerned about social justice and peace, those focused on unemployment, environmental issues, or spiritual and ethical values. It means raising awareness of the common interest that unites single-issue campaigns and bridges left-right antagonism.
Fair enough. In fact, there have been aspects of localisation upheld by the right, including condemnation by conservatives of the WTO and about NAFTA; but usually rightist views having to do with localization are oriented more along isolationist and nativist lines than humanist ones. Norberg-Hodge’s piece above was written in 2018, and even then, the time for rational exchange between people believing in science and people believing in conspiracy was past; any glance in 2021 at the social-media feed of a mainstream newspaper of TV station suggests it’s even worse now. What about using the power of the current governments to get localism implemented? Similar to the paradox of the Marxist-Lennist, Norberg-Hodge references the extant power of the state to create a situation that ultimately intends to bypass the state:
the nation state remains the political entity best suited to putting limits on global business, but at the same time more decentralized economic structures are needed, particularly when it comes to meeting basic needs.
The fact is — and this is my personal speculation, and perhaps an extreme one — we won’t have to argue about using the help of large-scale structures or need to worry about “raising awareness” to promote localism. The world will solve the problem of promoting localism for us; we just need to be there to shape it. As said above, we are in a storm, and localism will be forced upon us by the inability of nation-state to mitigate the storm, as a mix of factors from climate change to pandemics to disrupted supply chains — all of these arguably emanating from the internal contradictions of capitalism of which Marx spoke — impose hardships globally.
Surely the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic with all of its disruptions has prepared us for a vision of what this could look like. When this happens — as it surely will at some point, whether 5 years or 200 years from now — an informed structural localism will be the key to keeping an intact humanistic society. We’ve seen such societies arise with success in times and in places that are remote from state authority, ranging from Rojava in war-torn northern Syria to the Zapatistas in the jungles of Chiapas; in such places, external conditions have permitted an environment for the anarchist and the humanist to make good things happen.
Are we naive and simplistic enough to hope for disaster so that the promise of local paradise can occur? That’s not the point; firstly, as activists we have no more choice in creating such conditions than we do in changing the weather; and secondly, if disaster were the condition for progress, Haiti would be a utopia by now. Do you think that the vastness of the state makes this point moot, that we should focus on elections, and that the nation-state creates the greatest good for the greatest number? Maybe it has and maybe it hasn’t, but when I look at the United States and see lives lost in decades-long wars ranging from Vietnam to Afghanistan, when I see wealth repeatedly destroyed and transferred through recurring financial crises with no repercussions to the wealthy who created them, I have to think there’s a better way; or at least we have to try for a better way. The political system of the United States and the power of capitalism may seem inescapable, but as Ursula K. Le Guin famously said, so once too did the divine right of kings.
From Norberg-Hodge: the way forward is so much more than voting for “a new candidate within the same compromised political structure.” Talking “with those concerned about social justice and peace, those focused on unemployment, environmental issues, or spiritual and ethical values” understates the amount of work to be done, but she’s right, except that these efforts need be elevated structurally to create local networks of affinity groups, such as many of those we already have in Columbia, Missouri. Perhaps you have such groups in your community as well.
These are groups that don’t just talk, but also do the hands-on mutual-aid work of food production and delivery, homelessness support, and disaster relief. When the state fails to pick up the pieces from the storm — speaking metaphorically here, but literally as well when it comes to things like Hurricane Katrina or the Paradise fires — networks comprised of mutual aid groups can be in place to facilitate the building blocks for a true humanistic localism. As activists and community members we may not have the ability to change the weather or vanish the storm, but we do have the ability to mitigate its effects, and to use the opportunity to create a better world.
This is part III of a 4 or 5-part series about moving from abstract anarchist principles towards a working humanist societal structure. In the next installment we examine how previous attempts in history have worked and how they have failed; and in the last essay of the series we will explore how these concepts could be realized specifically in the city of Columbia, Missouri, and what they might look like.
Notes
[1] Perhaps because of the audience, in her 2018 paper Helena Norberg-Hodge makes a curious misattribution about globalization to the left: “Many people, especially on the left, associate globalisation with international collaboration, travel and the spread of humanitarian values…” it seems here that she must be speaking of the liberal “left” (near-right Democrats) given that anarchists were among the first to take militant action against globalization during the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.
“Every anarchist is a socialist, but not every socialist is an anarchist”
Adolph Fischer
“Anarchism is really a synonym for socialism. The anarchist is primarily a socialist whose aim is to abolish the exploitation of man by man.”
Daniel Guerin
A couple of years ago, a friend posted a survey among a group of mostly lefty people asking them to check the multiple political/economic descriptors that applied to them: Anarchist? Communist? Liberal? Democrat? Republican? Libertarian? I pointed out that the “socialist” category was missing, and when this omission was corrected, was surprised that none of the self-identified “anarchists” also checked the “socialist” box.
Members of our club, probably a majority, self-identify as anarchist. Various individuals in our local community also identify as anarchist (and unfortunately, we frequently encounter, as do you, many who use the term “anarchist” synonymously with chaos or mayhem—as in recently when press and pundits referred to the right-wing insurrection at the U.S. capitol as “anarchism.” Oh, if only!).
Well then, what is anarchism?
Sometimes it seems easier to start with what anarchism is NOT. First, as already stated, anarchism is not chaos. There’s also a tendency to dismiss anarchism as “Utopian” and somehow unattainable; and yes, while the goal of universal freedom can be hard to attain, there have been and there are, right now, successful communities operating under anarchist principles.
Along with this, there is a line of thought that under anarchism there is “no government,” but this is not necessarily true; there can be and there is governance consistent with concepts of anarchism, it’s just that governing is non-hierarchical and decentralized, association is voluntary, and leaders are temporary.
This brings us to another big misunderstanding about anarchism, which is what the scholar Murray Bookchin went into detail to call “lifestyle anarchism”: a preoccupation with ideas about individual autonomy rather than social freedom, perhaps dressed in trappings of graffiti and spray paint, and backed with vague notions about nihilism–“spicy liberals” is the description for it that I like. There is nothing wrong with either graffiti as a tactic or nihilism as a belief; Bookchin just felt that within this mindset there was a conspicuous neglect of the collective nature of anarchism, and a convenient acceptance of the narcissism that happens to be consistent with late-capitalist values. One need only visit the publications shelf of the local natural food store to see a raft of quasi-edgy magazines catering to this individualist mindset.
But there are differences between the anarchist thinkers of today and those of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Historian Barbara Epstein has written that, while the modern anarchism arising from the 1999 WTO meetings embodies the same egalitarian and anti-authoritarian perspective of previous times, today’s version is less concerned than 19th century anarchists about the role of the state. She talks about today’s movement tactically allowing for a “flexibility of perspectives”:
“The movement is organized along lines understood as anarchist by movement activists, made up largely of small groups that join forces on an ad hoc basis, for particular actions and other projects. Movement activists call this form of organization anarchist.”
This provides tactical advantages, in particular for the street and for specific actions. The downside to today’s tactically-advantageous “anarchism?” What do we do after we’ve gained success, like, say, after gaining an autonomous zone in Seattle? What governance do we go for? Has anyone thought ahead about this?
This is when a return to the 19th and early-20th century founders of the anarchist movement, and their embrace of socialism, might be valuable. From 1840 to the 1860s, while Marx and Engels were forming ideas about a socialism imposed by a revolutionary vanguard from above, anarchists like Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon were coalescing ideas about a socialism from below–one based on worker co-ops, voluntary association, and mutual aid. At meetings of what was first named the International Workingmen’s Association–better known as The International–early trade unions, socialists, communists, and anarchists tried to build unity while Marx and Bakunin–the key representatives of their respective communist and anarchist sides–hacked out the differences between their respective camps (with no small amount of acrimony and interpersonal conflict).
One thing that Marx and Bakunin could agree upon was the importance of material analyses. Where a liberal might say that societal problems like racism or sexism are things out in the world that are independent of economics, a materialist view would be that racism and sexism are inevitable outgrowths of material conditions; Bakunin thus agreed with Marx’s historical materialism: that religious, political, and cultural concerns are caused by economic manifestations, rather than the other way around.
These material conditions could include material relations that are authoritarian, such as domination and submission (slavery, feudalism, capitalism), or, relations that are cooperative (socialism, anarchism, communism). The historical materialist view essentially captures the difference between today’s liberals, who employ single-issue mindsets around things like racism and sexism without addressing them systematically, and leftists, who keep an awareness of the underpinnings of capitalism in addressing the same problems. Another example might be the difference between seeing Trumpism as an anomaly, or seeing it as a natural consequence of capitalism. Essentially, in today’s USA, it is the difference between reformist and revolutionary mindsets; from philosopher and activist Vanessa Willis:
“While the tendency to reduce societal effects to economics is sometimes dismissed as ‘class reductionism’, to make a world without sexism and racism would require a massive redirection and mobilization of resources–interventions that are not compatible with capitalist motivations for seeking profit; this is not to say that sexism and racism don’t also have to be dealt with in revolutionary movements.”
Early anarchists and Marxists disagreed about the role of the state and electoral politics in moving the revolutionary process forward. Where both Marx and Bakunin wanted the end product to be True Communism–a place where workers, rather than capitalists, owned the means of production (the land, the tools, the factories, the distribution systems), the profound disagreement in their two camps was on the way of getting from here to there. Marx wanted the transformation of private property into collective property to be accomplished by the “power of the state” and predicted an eventual “withering away of the state” in the process, whereas anarchists like Bakunin denounced, on first principles, use of the state, favoring direct action instead. From Barbara Epstein:
“Anarchists… criticized Marxists for tending in practice to treat the state as an instrument that could simply be taken over and used for other ends. Anarchists saw the state not as a tool, but as an instrument of oppression, no matter in whose hands. The Stalinist experience lent credence to that critique.” (A famous quote from Bakunin: “When the people are being beaten by a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People’s stick.”)
It’s not just a utopian dream; anarchist-like forms of governance and economic socialism have had varying degrees of success in places ranging from early-20th century Makhnovia (Ukraine), 1930’s Catalonia (Spain), 1930’s Shinmin (Manchuria), to today’s Oxaca, Chiapas, and Rojava. Anarchist-informed production has gained credibility in everything from Bernie Sander’s talk of worker’s co-ops to Worker-Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDE’s), with examples like the Mondragon Corporation, a federation of worker cooperatives in Basque Spain. These are means of production that are owned by the workers–in other words, socialism emanating from the bottom up.
So… once again; repeat after me: anarchism is a socialism. In the next installment we expand on anarchist socialism and how it can be applied to existing and future institutions and governing concepts, and perhaps paradoxically, why these applications probably shouldn’t use the word “anarchism” in their descriptions. In the last essay of the series we will explore how these concepts could be realized specifically in the city of Columbia, Missouri, and what they might look like. Finally, in the same way that the Star Wars movie franchise started partway through and circled back to Chapter I, we might circle back to complete a Part I to see how, and in what context, concepts of anarchism arose in the first place.
Last week, people on a Reddit forum called Wall Street Bets noticed that hedge funds had significant short positions in stocks such as GameStop. The group was prevailed upon to use people’s stimulus checks to buy the stock, driving the price way up. Unlike buying “long” on stocks, where (unless buying on margin) the most one can lose is one’s initial investment, margin calls on shorts can result in losing more than the value of the stock; this forced many of the hedge funds not only to sell at a loss greater than their initial investment, but to sell other assets at a loss to cover the margin calls. Some of the hedge funds were ruined. It was gratifying to see, for the first time in 4 or so years, people in social media on the left and right agreeing, for once, about big boys being deservedly taken down.
Since then, there have been complaints from the mainstream financial industry about “fairness” and a need for regulation so that this can’t happen again. This straw-mancomplaint about fairness and the need for better “regulating,” and “unpredictability” in the markets since the GameStop Revolt, somehow reminds me of the complaint about the 1860 Civil War – the complaint that it was not about slaves at all, but about about “states’ rights.” The states’ rights to what? To own slaves. Similarly, regarding the stock revolt, the powers-that-be say markets should be regulated… things should be fair, right? Well, fair to whom and regulated for what? For them, the markets need to be regulated to make them less unpredictable for THE PRIVILEGED & WEALTHY PEOPLE WHO HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO BE IN THE STOCK & COMMODITY MARKETS to begin with.
Nuff said. Moving forward to this week, public radio’s Marketwatch program began the day yesterday (Monday February 1, 2021) suggesting that the silver commodity market was going much the same way as GameStop:
Indeed; silver, represented here by an Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) called SLV, spiked up 9.3% yesterday, to end the trading say at an 8-year high. Could it be another GameStop?
Hard to say, but silver is a more complex market. Yes, silver is probably a natural place to look for groundswell investor activism, because it has been a haven for mavericks and conspiracy theorists since the Hunt Brothers attempted to drive its price up in the 1970s, resulting in a crash that all but ruined them:
Sound familiar, maybe like some of the far-right drivel of the past decade? I spent the better part of a the 2000’s hanging out on the platforms of silver investors – “Silver Bugs” – and they can be a paranoid lot; they believe that, for years, large banks and other nefarious forces have conspired not only to destroy the world, but to suppress the price of silver, because silver is real money owned by the little people; the price of silver, they argued, should be well over $50/ounce, but it wasn’t because large banks and hedge funds were artificially driving it downward. The thing is, as with many paranoids, there was a basis for the Silver Bugs’ thesis; in 2016, Deutsche Bank was successfully prosecuted for price fixing in the silver market. Again, this all gets at an interesting overlap between right-wing and left libertarians (anarchists) that we can address some other time: both agree that the GameStop rebellion was a good thing! Right libertarians have been into hard-asset gold & silver for long time – go to any gun show and you’ll see several tables showcasing silver rounds & other bullion for sale (my personal opinion is that all anarchists might do well to emulate this in a small way and to set aside a few rounds of silver for emergencies, but we’ll also save that for another time).
In the meantime, what will silver do? Is silver the next GameStop?
Silver has a way of taking down the most experienced and most confident investors. After a parabolic run yesterday, it took out many long buyers with a minor crash today, losing, at the time of this writing, some 8% from yesterday’s peak. Tomorrow or the next day, it is quite possible that it might again peak, but if it does so on weak volume – the volume being shown by the columns circled in blue on the chart above – GameStoppers, sorry to say, had better run for the hills. Double tops like this occurred prior to the notorious silver crash of 1980 and again in 2011.
We at MidMO JBGC spend a fair amount of time looking to history for clues about what to expect as American society continues to unravel & reset. I’m sure we are not alone in this. As examples, although Trump’s regime has often been compared to 1930’s Germany, one of us wrote in 2017 that comparing the rise of Trumpism to 1920s Germany and the Friekorps (before Nazism was born) might be more apt. Similarly, Mid-MO JBGC author Alan Buddug has examined the KKK in the 1960s and also compared today’s decline to previous examples of collapse in places such as Sri Lanka.
In recent weeks the US far right has called for insurrections prior to and on January 20th 2021 at every capitol of all 50 states as well as at the US capitol. Given previous attempted kidnappings of state governors, a previous storming of at least one state capitol, and an attempted takeover of the US capitol, what might we expect on January 20th ? And what might we expect afterwards?
Let’s look at one end of the continuum: organized & coordinated attack by force, similar to or worse than what we saw on January 6th 2021 in Washington D.C.
Like the US today, Italy in the early 1920s was divided & torn from war, economic stress, and cultural divide. Incipient socialist movements and general strikes brought fear to Italy’s middle class; socialists had actually performed well in 1919 elections, but overall the liberal coalition that had previously held a government together failed; “widespread social discontent, aggravated by middle-class fear of a socialist revolution and by disappointment over Italy’s meagre gains from the peace settlement after World War I, created an atmosphere favourable for Mussolini’s rise to power.” Fascists planned an insurrection to take place on October 28 1922, whereby Mussolini’s blackshirts would march on Rome and capture strategic locations in Italy. The army could have easily stopped it, but the king refused to sign an order for a state of siege, so the army was not called upon to oppose the organized fascists, which numbered some 30,000; the king then handed power over to Mussolini, who wielded it until the collapse of Italy under the Allied invasion of 1945.
Does the far right in the US have the ability to muster a somewhat-competent force like Mussolini’s blackshirts? Or would it be a cluster of middle-aged guys with paunches and neck beards wearing antlered headdresses? According to the SPLC, the Oath Keepers, one of the most radicalized constitutional militia groups, has boasted of having up to 30,000 members. While the levels of dedication and organization inside such borderline fash groups are likely variable and dubious–and there’s often a temptation to laugh at pot-bellied militia members–there are plenty of deadly examples indicating they should be taken seriously.
Still, until Charlottesville, most deadly attacks were isolated lone-wolf type incidents, such as church killings in Charleston in 2015. In earlier times, when a contained far right lacked US Executive-branch support and was confined to the background, they largely made due with smaller-scale terrorist actions such as those originating from the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s or in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Can they still organize, especially after the fallout from January 6th? Or have they had a change of heart? My opinion is yes to the first and no to the second. Word is that even though seriously deplatformed on social media, far-right groups have successfully migrated to other and encrypted platforms. And while one might think that 5 deaths would prompt some serious self reflection, a casual glance at the Facebook feed of any MSM TV station shows perpetual denial of factual events from rightist sympathizers. Proclamations of “AntEEfa” as cause of the January 6th capitol violence were rife online in the days following the event, and while I have nothing quantitative with which to back this up, to my eyes the mindset of denial remains as prevalent now as anytime in the past 4 or more years, whether about climate change or masks.
So… which is it? Are they driven back to loan wolf status, or will we seen an updated version of Mussolini’s march on Rome?
Our general expert opinion is: we don’t know. But you had better not underestimate them, and you had better not take anything for granted, especially given the larger contexts of climate change, financial collapse, and global pandemic. Perhaps the best summary might be this expanded take by Mitch of Armed Margins, which we simultaneously excerpt, quote, and paraphrase here:
“I do think this era of symbolic protest within contested public space is dying… since Charlottesville we’ve managed to drive the alt right underground… but the right was still able to make inroads into the Republican masses, the Donald Trump administration, the Republican party… all those extremist views [are now] legitimized in the hands of [the] right-wing masses.”
As the Italian war effort failed in 1943, Mussolini was removed but then rehabilitated by a German occupation until, in late April 1945, after 23 years of authoritarian rule and 2 years of civil war, Italian partisans captured Mussolini and his mistress and executed them by firing squad. Reportedly their bodies were kicked, spat upon, and even urinated upon, hung upside down from the roof of a gas station, and then stoned from below by civilians.
In the same way that it’s easy & tempting to think of the bad effects of capitalism—debt crises, wars, income inequalities, bad corporations and bad employers—as isolated things apart from a system, it seems to be trendy & tempting right now to think of 2020 as an anomaly—as if the bad things about 2020 have to do with some unlucky attribute of the year itself. Can you imagine, though, if 2021 is just as bad, or even worse? Can’t you just see the headlines now?
“You thought 2020 was bad… welcome to 2021!”
Well… we’ll have to see what happens in 2021. In the meantime we at Mid-MO JBGC choose to look at 2020 deterministically, as the inevitable and logically-consequent result of cumulative decades of bad policy taking place under a stochastic uptick in density-dependent factors—the latter being big words to describe things like climate crisis and health pandemics.
Just the same, we would be remiss in not noting that 2020 was a remarkable year for bringing all this to the fore at one time. After years of apparent western imperviousness to things like Bird Flu & Ebola, the Covid-19 pandemic emerged as something that didn’t just happen to brown-skinned people in far-off places, killing hundreds of thousands in the west, and permanently ruining millions more lives through chronic illness and losses of income, jobs, and housing—to say nothing of grief suffered by surviving loved ones. But Covid also provided the world with the emergence of the notion of mutual aid, a term largely unknown to the U.S. middle-class prior to this year; in some places, mutual aid initiatives for food, household goods, utility and rent payments may have borne resemblance to a charity model, but in others, such as New York, block-by-block mutual aid functioned more in the reciprocal nature of the original intention of the term. Despite the requirements of social distancing and despite being kicked off of our Facebook organizing platform during the Great FB purge of 2020, within two weeks after the first Covid case in Missouri, JBGC members and others spun off the Como Mutual Aid project, which between March and September helped an average of 20 families per week with items like groceries and prescriptions and, for a time, helped with rent and utility payments. We sincerely thank the many donors, volunteer workers, and volunteer coordinators who helped with what, for us, was a massive undertaking. Also this year we continued with the 3rd season of our Mobile Soup Kitchen, which still functions during the pandemic, providing an average of 80 individual meals over 3 mornings per week throughout the winter months to homeless individuals on the street or in camps.
The nature of living under a pandemic also helped give shape to our support group, the Friends of John Brown, which offered up several socially-distanced homesteading types of workshops this year, including ones on victory gardening, home canning, and rabbit processing. If mutual aid and ideas and skills about collectivity under changing societal conditions interest you, we suggest you find out more about our Facebook Friends support group by contacting us at: MidMoJBGC@protonmail.com
After decades of police murders of people of color followed by failed efforts at police reform, 2020 saw public attention focused for the first time, after the tragic murders of George Floyd and others, on the topic of police abolition. While the pandemic forced us to end our monthly public meet & greets and limited our ability to table or to make public presentations, we provided an outdoor police abolition workshop in June that coincided with a nightly rally by our friends at People’s Defense. Locally we saw leadership on this from the faith community, and we applaud Missouri Faith Voices for taking a firm stance on police defunding. The faith community also came through in community care during a particularly difficult time, with Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbia taking direct action on utility payoffs as well as responsibility for continuation of Room At The Inn during Covid. The already-challenging work done by Wilkes Blvd UMC and Catholic Workers with Turning Point day center and Loaves & Fishes soup kitchen was made more difficult by the pandemic, but club members supplied three weekly Door Keepers and served food, mostly outdoors, for Loaves & Fishes every 2nd Sunday.
We also saw the rise of new organizations in Columbia concerned with community defense and arms training for the marginalized. We were glad to see the continued growth of Sharp End Gun Club and their training programs for women & people of color, and before the onset of Covid partnered with them in one indoor training event and one regional meeting. We were glad to work with People’s Defense in security and medic support for several events; especially notable was the emergence of the People’s Defense Security Team, who, in the wake of two vehicle attacks and several armed threats, helped normalize open firearms carry by the left in protests in Columbia. While left-wing protesters in places like Seattle and at some places in the south have become accustomed to having armed support, this is something that, we admit, we never ever thought we would see happen in Columbia Missouri… at least, not unless things got really, really bad.
Well, perhaps, things got just about that bad, because (speaking of firearms), starting in about March, we noticed an uptick in contacts from new shooters wanting training. Typically, we begin these with with a no-ammunition living-room show & tell and move on to a range trip if the party is further interested. While sessions like these were limited by the requirements of masking and social distancing, there was sufficient demand to make things happen in small numbers… and as the election drew nearer and right-wing escalation became pervasive, we received even more inquiries. Such requests rapidly fell off after the Biden election victory, presumably due to the public perception of a lessened threat from the right wing paramilitary violence.
Let us say here that we are glad to provide this resource, especially for the marginalized in society; and while we do provide security for protests, we should make clear that our larger goal here is for you to become empowered to defend your own community. We like that term “community defense” in the broadest sense—as having to do with the health, security, and resources of your own community, block-by-block.
We will see how things play out in 2021. While we hope for a lessening of the conditions and policies that bring pain and deprivation to so many, we also hope that in the wake of all that’s happened people will continue to depend upon each other and to further build community in response. May the “normal” that we return to after pandemic living continue to build on the lessons from 2020.
In summary; for 2020, we: -Presented one outdoor workshop on police abolition -Provided one active shooter training workshop for one local organization -With our support group, Friends of John Brown, presented 3 workshops on food & homesteading topics -Trained 4 novice shooters over 7 indoor & outdoor sessions -Tabled at one public event -Provided security and medic support for 2 large regional events -Provided security and medic support for 4 Columbia protest events -Made 11 post-covid food & fuel drops to Columbia homeless camps -Co-led one training event with Sharp End Gun Club and participated in another -Coordinated security training with People’s Defense -Participated in security at People’s Defense rallies and protests -Participated in 3 community-wide homeless camp cleanups -Served food on 12 Sundays at Loaves & Fishes soup kitchen -Provided at least 3 weekly volunteers for Loaves & Fishes soup kitchen over each of 52 weeks, totaling over 230 person-hours of help -Provided over 1300 individual meals over the 2019-2020 Winter seasons via the John Brown Mobile Soup Kitchen -Spun off the Como Mutual Aid initiative, which went on to serve ~20 families/week for 6 months
A lot of the service that Mid-MO JBGC does is concerned with the homeless community. Several of us work weekly as “Door Keepers” – hosts of a sort – at the local Loaves & Fishes soup kitchen. With our local support group, Friends of John Brown, we also serve food monthly at the same kitchen. Others of us have volunteered for the winter-lodging program Room At The Inn, for Operation Safe Winter, or for several community-organized camp cleanup projects over the past year. And then there’s our John Brown Mobile Soup Kitchen, which for the past three seasons has served soup & baked goods 3 mornings per week for about 25-to-30 people per day, totaling some ~ 1,200 individual meals served each winter season.
In the United States, nearly one million people experience homelessness any given month. The lifespan of homeless people is between 42-50 years old, or about 25 years less than the life span of housed people. Opportunities for illness in the homeless community are endless. Two years ago a young man from Texas was on antibiotic treatment for a tick bite he received in one of Columbia’s camps, but the antibiotic resulted in diarrhea, which made it challenging for him to be away from a restroom – a near impossibility in a community where lengthy travel is required between the soup kitchen, downtown facilities, and camps and sleeping facilities. Later that summer he went to the emergency room – the treatment place of choice (society’s choice!) for the homeless community– after injuring his shoulder while falling off his bike. He also has circular scars on his arms where he has injured himself intentionally from cigarette burns. He is presently in jail on $50,000 bond for charges that, as best we can determine, have to do with running from the police.
In fact, many homeless endure bike accidents or are hit by cars, especially at night. In 2019, the community lost a charismatic and well-loved Cheyenne known as “Chief” when he sustained an injury accident riding his bike home one night after dark. Ironically, Chief was technically no longer homeless, having recently acquired his own apartment. Some people may have deep slashes on arms, hands, or wrists from from bike wrecks, self-inflicted wounds like those mentioned above, random attacks, or even firearms accidents. Without antibiotics, cuts and lacerations can result in gangrene and amputation, and we have bandaged and pleaded with the injured to get themselves antibiotic intervention. Amputation also occurs from frostbite, as happened with two members from one of the camps we fed in Winter 2019; one man lost several toes, the other lost the tips of several fingers. Two years later, both are still with us, but the man with missing toes walks with a limp while he dwells in the interstices of abandoned stores in the town’s old business loop.
Deaths from overdoses are common. When bad batches of K2 hit the streets, our local Turning Point day center can be deluged with overdoses and ambulance calls, with the director having to do chest compressions on expiring patrons several times a week or even several times a day. In 2019 one of our young homeless men, still greatly missed, died from alcohol poisoning, another common occurrence in the community. Alcohol or drugs may be ways to self medicate in a cruel world, but in another sense can be thought of slow ways of committing suicide; tragically, our most recent homeless death in the community was by direct suicide, that of a young woman found dead last week reportedly by hanging.
Sometimes injury or death come by adversarial means, with bad results on one or both sides of the confrontation. A young homeless man who flies a sign on the corner for cash was beat up one night by a gang of men, and had scars and dents across his nose the next day to show for it. A homeless guy who sometimes carries a machete injured a young homeless woman’s arm in a dispute last year, ending up in jail on $100,000 in bond. Earlier this year another member of our community died in a fatal stabbing from a different homeless man, the latter someone who was seriously mentally ill. He was someone who we had watched descend further into agitation and violence for weeks, and yet were powerless to help, as once again the state’s incarceration system eventually became the default repository for mental illness.
Sometimes things just happen and we are at a loss as to figure out how or why. A small white man, mentally ill but never violent – “lemon, lime, and orange with crushed ice,” he repeated over and over to me one time while I tried to gently escort him from a church service – was discovered drowned in a creek earlier this year. Another man, amiable and never one to cause trouble, has been missing since summer, his camp abandoned. In itself, camp abandonment is not unusual, but in the previous week he had collapsed and injured his head in the heat. We wait to hear news of his whereabouts.
While we in Columbia Missouri have yet to notice an increase in homelessness due to the pandemic and the expiration of eviction moratoria, we have to watch with apprehension as density-dependent conditions (like pandemics and climate) compound poor societal decisions (about money, care, and law enforcement) to potentially result in greater numbers of the homeless. Not everyone can visit a homeless camp or volunteer at a shelter, but many of our best supporters in this work have been the donors who cook soup, bake muffins, or whose financial help allows us to purchase the hundreds of handwarmers, gloves, and socks that we go through each winter. As we enter the longest night of the year on December 21st, candlelight vigils are often observed for the occasion of the Annual Homeless Persons’ Remembrance Day, this one being the 30th. If it makes you feel better, do light a candle in remembrance… but you might also keep in mind that tiny candles can do a remarkably good job heating and lighting a tent. The next day, collect your candles, with those of your friends, and repurpose them – take them to your local service worker, to your local day shelter, to a homeless camp, or to us – where their flame can be used to heat & light someone’s tent.
Some but not all U.S. metro areas could grow all the food they need locally, according to a new study estimating the degree to which the American food supply could be localized based on population, geography, and diet. The modeling study … is published today in Environmental Science & Technology.
According to the study, Columbia, MO, which is central to mid-Missouri, is positioned well to localize its food supply. However, just having the potential to localize isn’t enough — we must actually do the work!
A couple of years ago, a friend posted a survey among a group of mostly lefty people asking them to check the multiple political/economic descriptors that applied to them: Anarchist? Communist? Liberal? Democrat? Republican? Libertarian? I pointed out that the “socialist” category was missing, and when this omission was corrected, was surprised that none of the self-identified “anarchists” also checked the “socialist” box.
