Protected: the little things do matter.

I very frequently come across this attitude that left-anarchists should shut up and work with the “anarcho-”capitalists to smash the State, and deal with the differences in ideology later. Basically a “You can have whatever you want, as long as you don’t use aggression against it” mentality.

After I ceased to call myself an “anarcho-”capitalist over a year ago, I went through a similar period where I was all about smashing the State, and leaving it up to the post-State society where people can figure out what property regime would be best, etc. I didn’t care about theory at all, and I thought it was mostly irrelevant to the real activism at hand. All of us anarchists should work together to smash the State now, and fuck the rest. As long as everything was voluntary and stateless, it would be fine, or at least better than things are now.

These days, I really want to go back in time and slap myself for all that. I view it to be nothing but pure laziness that stems from not wanting to think and exercise my brain. I wanted to be comfortable simply smashing the State without thinking about anything.

Here are a few basic lessons I learned when I finally moved on from that dead-end of a position:

What we call the “State” today is not the root of all evil.
This is possibly the most influential lesson I have learned. Many will argue that all ‘anti-statists’ should work to smash the current State now, but if I do not view the current State to be the root of all hierarchy and authority, and I would rather work on striking the root, and not just a branch, then the differences become more clear. Secondly, our tactics are going to differ, for my tactics will focus on the root of all hierarchical and oppressive systems, while yours will focus on a branch and often enable new branches to spring up.

For example, if I think your version of ‘property’ logically leads to statism (as anarchists have traditionally argued) then I cannot really find a compatibility ground between my ideology and yours, because anarchism is diametrically opposed to all forms of statism. If I consider any system that grants one ultimate decision-making power over a territory to be statism, then we do not really agree on what constitutes a ‘State’, and thus cannot work together.

No, it’s not that “libsocs just believe property will result in a nightmare world.” It’s not that we’re terrified of people becoming dictators over their property. It’s that ancap justifies those, and that is what makes ancap immoral and statist. If I said I believe in a system where it’s okay for all people to rape others, it does not matter if my system won’t happen because not everyone is inclined to rape others. What matters is that my system justifies the “nightmare” scenario, and that is why it is immoral.

‘Aggression’ and ‘voluntary’ are dependent on what property theory you hold on to.
This one doesn’t require so much clarification as the others, hopefully. But to put it simply, what a left-anarchist considers ‘aggression’ may not be considered ‘aggression’ by a capitalist. So theory is important if you want to use the term ‘aggression.’

The mentality that left-anarchists can go form their own societies under an “anarcho-”capitalist society, is only an illusion of ‘pluralism.’ For if the left-anarchists must work within the “anarcho-”capitalist framework, then they are basically being expected to follow “anarcho-”capitalist norms even despite disagreeing with them.

The attitude that “anything goes if it’s voluntary” enables closet fascists. To quote the Bay Area National Anarchism’s FAQ:

“Q. What is National Anarchism?
A. National Anarchism is a form of anarchism that advocates for establishing independent tribal zones where people can live the kind of life they want with the kind of people they want.”

Here they are essentially using the voluntaryism principle as a cover for their immoral racist apologetics. If racism is voluntary, it’s fine– no matter how much of a perverse effect it may have on society, it’s okey-dokey. Many voluntaryists will voice out their opposition to racism, but they end up naively enabling racists via the voluntaryism mentality.

As Brainpolice has been pointing out for quite a while:

“I came to the realization that if you put aside essentially all of your values simply because of a nominally shared opposition to a single institution, and that if you form a completely open-ended broad coalition of self-proclaimed “anti-statists”, what you end up with is an unstable hodge-podge of people with completely different social goals that will inherently fragment as it plays out. Not only that, it conceptually devolves into absurdity, with things like monarchy and nationalism being snuck into anti-authoritarian movements on the grounds of an illusory “pluralism”. This attitude opens itself up to “entryism”.

What this kind of “voluntaryism” ends up doing is stretching the meaning of freedom to the point of absurdity out of its desire to be all-inclusive. Everything about “the state” that one may have initially set out to oppose can be repacked in a new, relativized framework, and libertarianism ends up looking like a shallow and hypocritical doctrine to the extent that it does this. And it often entails a strange line drawn in which anti-statism and non-aggression is treated as an absolute categorical imperative, while beyond this dividing line all questions of value are left to relativity. I’ve never seen a libertarian sensibly rationalize this line.”

So in brief: people need to think deeper, and stop using voluntaryist or extreme-pluralist rhetoric to justify not wanting to think about the intellectual conflicts.

- Noor