Conversations with a young friend… Posted by Marek Vermin on February 15th, 2006
These are from internet conversations I’ve been having with a young fan named Cody. He’s given me permission to re-post them, since I can’t think of what else a journal is good for. ☺
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Hey, I sent this to The Martyr Index but it’s been about a month and I haven’t got a reply. More or less, I said, in an anarchist society, what would stop the assholes from destroying the peaceful society. An example would be the Native Americans and Native Canadians being destroyed by the Europeans. I also gave some information on the Libertarian party but I didn’t realize how big they actually were in the states and you have probably heard of them.
P.S. It hit me yesterday how theories mean nothing in the real world when I was talking to somebody who lived through the Nicaragua (sorry if I misspelled that) wars. They had to run through the jungle where there was bodies everywhere. Of course theories mean something but it all changes “when you really start to play.”
P.P.S. I’m thinking (when I’m old enough) that I might go to Mexico through an organization my uncle was talking about that pays for my flight and everything. I get to go down there and build irrigation systems for six weeks. Wouldn’t that be rad? I know you were talking about people needing to focus on lives around them first, even though life everywhere else is important but it helps people and I get an incredible life experience, that will always stick with me and help me understand a bit more about life.
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Hi Cody,
I will try to address your concerns as best I can.
I think it is hard to envision how exactly a full anarchist society would work, primarily because there are so many ways to organize in a relatively non-dominating fashion, or in a way that minimizes levels of dominion. The real trick is recognizing that there are actually millions of anarchism all around us, just like there are millions of communisms all around us, they just aren’t the dominant framework for the bulk of socio-political organization. But communism is huge and all around us. The family is a mode of communal organization that capitalism has not been able to destroy, even if it has been eroded and whittled down to tiny, isolated units. There is a general principle of from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs inherent within family structures. At the same time, the family is also a locale where I think that it is shown that authority and domination is necessary to some regard and cannot be done away with altogether. Even in an anarchist society parents would still have to have the authority to pull kids out of the street and tell them they cannot play with combines, wood augers, etc. We need to learn ‘no’ even, just so we can rebel against it and push the social equation.
But while the family is an example of communism and not anarchism, friendships typically provide good examples of anarchism in everyday life. Friendships are fulfilling a human need for social interaction and meaningful interchange, but they also imply a level of mutual consent. If there is a gang of friends and they want to organize a bowling night, a leader emerges to organize it. Typically this form of spontaneous leadership is based on the consent of the followers and this is REALLY important to note. A follower is a consensual, active participant. A follower is not necessary a blind sheep; they are someone who chooses to follow a leader because of a belief in the good of that leader. If the leader betrays their trust, they will remove their consent and if enough people remove their consent, the only way the leader can remain a leader is by becoming a master, which is impossible unless the leader can garner enough support to intimidate people into doing their bidding. In the case of a bunch of friends who organize a bowling night, if someone begins to become tyrannical, it is unlikely that they would be able to get anyone to follow them, unless someone has a love for them, despite them being an asshole. But the consensus typically stands as “why would I hang out with an asshole?” and therefore the leader of bowling night has little incentive to become an asshole and rule, as it has more drawbacks than benefits.
Now the trick about anarchism is that this little scenario, to some extent, has to be translated to a large social scale, and that it has to be done through belief and social consensus. That means that even if ‘the Revolution’ - the social transformation of power relations from a severely hierarchical one to a generally horizontal one - takes place, it might not necessarily include ‘the revolution’ - the transformation of social consensus towards leaders, responsibility and authority in general. The State is effective because it is upheld by belief - the belief of the people who pay taxes, the belief of the bureaucrats who work for it, the belief of the soldiers who defend it, the belief of the politicians who attempt to run it. At one point the State needed a physical embodiment - the king or the emperor - who WAS the State. But now we are liberal people and the State is maintained solely on the belief of its absolute real-ness. If someone claimed to be the king of Canada and no one believed them, they would be considered insane and committed, but if 50% of the people believed them, there might be a civil war, and if 90% of the people believed them, we would simply have a monarchy. So anarchism requires a type of belief that can sustain it and I believe that this happens culturally, rather than economically or politically. The other components are absolutely critical, since infrastructure and struggle informs belief, but they have to happen concurrently and culture is the slowest moving fucker of all. It moves so subtly that we hardly even notice it, but Israelis are eating falafels now, there is punk rock rebellion in Indonesia, and recycling - something that would have been scoffed at in the 1960s - is standard practice amongst most Canadians today. Also, tons of things that we take for granted, like the value sets we admire - humility, compassion, etc. - are values that have been transmitted culturally over a long time and they have competed with other things. The Christian ethos of compassion and mercy, for example, can be somewhat linked to the emergence of the European notion of human rights. Although human rights aren’t necessarily practiced by states in many circumstances, even the US government has to pay at least lip service to the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The Romans never would have. They would have said, “fuck you, slave, lick my boot-heel,” and conquered the world. The discourse of rights serves to arm people with moral strength and they will resist certain tyrannies more quickly because they think they are entitled to something. The American rights discourse, established by the slave-holders, even served to provide the slaves with the moral ground to resist and fight against slavery.
So we have all of these little revolutions all the time and sometimes they converge into big moments, but it is only when we think that deliverance has come that we run into a scenario like Cuba, the USSR or, like you mentioned, Nicaragua.
Now, back to the problem of the Europeans wiping out the Native Americans. First, I would like to make a few notations to the questions. It is important to acknowledge a few things. First, the Native Americans were not one unit; they were many nations with numerous systems. Those systems had varying levels of tyranny. The warrior-society of the Iroquois and the system of the Arawak were relatively non-hierarchical and egalitarian, whereas numerous other warrior societies were extremely tyrannical, even murderous at times, and some, like the Aztecs, were massive empires which had grown decadent and corrupt and were highly racist even. The Aztecs were so oppressive and corrupt that the Mayans had no desire whatsoever to resist when Cortéz rode in pretending to be Quetzalcoatl and began to destroy the Aztec empire with superior weaponry and cavalry. In fact, Cortéz was able to subdue the entire empire with almost no effort. One can only guess that the Mayans were relieved to see it go. In the end, the Spanish were pretty big fucks to them too, but I don’t think people tend to see the Hitler in the crowd of Mussolinis.
But the Europeans did come and outgun the Native Americans. Not only that, but most of the land was taken without bloodshed. By and large it was taken by contract and politics (which should be read as tricks and lies). In many cases, leaders of the people consensually bartered it away in exchange for petty fiefdoms. If the Native Americans were aware of European history and technology, it is quite likely that the anti-colonial resistances would have happened quite sooner and with much more vigour. Also, the continent was highly fragmented with many opposing interests and allegiances, so a divide and conquer strategy (divide et imperium developed by the Romans and incidentally the name of a new Martyr Index tune) was easy for the Europeans to use.
The major difference between then and now is that we live in a post-modern technologically-intertwined world with international communications, almost instantaneous travel (a package or a person can go from Japan to Kansas now in one day, whereas in 1491, it would have taken months just to get from Kansas to Mexico City) and access to almost any information we would desire. One of the things that both Marx and Bakunin agreed upon is that in order for a modern revolution to be successful, it would have to be international in scope. That is even why the USSR had a branch called the Comintern (Communist International), because it was hoped that Lenin would be the vanguard of the international communist revolution. By the time Stalin disbanded it and demanded control of all communist parties under the complete guidance of the USSR, it was obvious that the communist revolution was not going to be anywhere near global any time soon, especially a revolution led by the USSR, which had become one of the most reactionary forces in the world.
Which is why I suggest that we have to re-conceive of revolution not as an overthrow of a system in one big orgasmic thrust, but rather as an ecology; it should be seen as something that ebbs and flows, sometimes growing in massive spurts, but generally it is hard to discern where the focal point is because it is really all happening in various layers. A revolution against hierarchy requires many conditions and many strategies and we cannot afford to keep wasting people’s lives for something that we dogmatically believe is going to deliver people from evil once and for all. Of course, we have to believe in our struggle, but we have to look around and see where it exists INSIDE the current system(s), and grow and expand that with millions of little struggles and sometimes big ones that are convergences of those struggles and resistances. The only way to safeguard it against assholes, is to have the assholes believe that it is the most inevitable state of affairs, and then just be anarchist assholes instead of capitalist or statist ones. 
I hope that this helped at least to bridge some of your concerns. There is so much to discuss, because there is so much complexity in the world, and I don’t really have so many answers as I have ideas and questions.
In solidarity,
Mark
P.S. I think your idea to travel to Mexico and take in the experiences of working with people on projects there is a great idea and it will give you a wealth of knowledge that you wouldn’t have received otherwise. Cheers! Na zdraví!
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Why do people react so badly? Is it because I’m 14? Is it because I don’t present it right? Is it because people have been conditioned? I’ll talk to teachers, or whoever. And they’ll just say that anarchy is wrong and they won’t even let me say anything. Why?
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Hi Cody.
Well, I think it is a combination of everything. First of all, most people don’t think anarchism is possible, even though it exists in various aspects throughout their lives. In this regard, it is likely because most people don’t really understand what anarchism is. And it is a difficult thing to explain, because it hasn’t existed as a dominant political structure … ever (excepting a few minor instances throughout history, which are at best brief). Anarchism is a reaction to domination. It can’t actually exist without domination, since it is by definition reactionary. In the instances where models of anarchism have existed (and often continue to exist) it is because people do not conceive of it as a reactionary element and it is not conceived anarchistically… if that makes sense at all. When we hang out with friends we never think of it as an act of defiance against networks of domination. The model is egalitarian and non-rulership based, but it is not in reaction to domination that exists there otherwise. However, anarchism as it exists today is framed against what it is like to be dominated and therefore it becomes somewhat speculative and structured inside the language of domination. It is itself chained to the idea of domination. So, this is part of what makes it so easy to misunderstand. Positively stated, there are so many possible notions of anarchism that it is difficult to define accurately, and there are so many strategies that it is hard to meet theories with practices in any sort of coherent manner.
That said, I think that if a 30 year old like me starts to speak about anarchism, I am taken a little more seriously. This is unfortunate, but it has to do with a number of things. First, people who are 14 are greatly underestimated in our culture. But it is true that someone who is 30 has over twice the lived experience of a 14 year old. Even someone who is relatively sheltered will have had the opportunity to see more life pass by and get a take on the order of things. Younger folks tend to have more extreme swings of opinion, so if someone is still an anarchist when they are 30, they either must know a thing or two about it or they are certifiably insane. Meanwhile if a 14 year old is an anarchist, it can often be dismissed as a ’stage’. I think that it is unfortunate that so many thoughtful people are written off because of their age though. A lot of times people tend to forget that just because someone is young and passionate does not mean that they are barking up the wrong tree. Anarchists tend to have questioned many more values than people who ride the status quo, no matter how young they are. The same can be said of any ideological framework outside of the dominant discourse.
The only thing I can suggest is that you just keep plodding away and learning more. Speak to people who are willing to listen and forget about those who think you are full of crap. An adult who isn’t willing to hear your opinion will not be convinced, because they think that they have heard what you want to say before and they think that you aren’t as wise as them. So, forget about them. Of course, if it is a teacher who thinks they can fail you for your opinion, I think you should challenge that and it is a fight worth fighting, but otherwise, it isn’t worth your energy. There are a ton of people who will listen to you and talk to you and take you seriously, so wasting time on people who feel they are your superiors is inefficient and unnecessarily stressful.
That said, I have also learned over the years that no one is ever convinced of anything by a single conversation unless it is something already itching in their head. People are more likely to believe in something if they can see it in front of them and if there is a culture of it circulating around them. Someone who is immersed in anarchist discourse because they are hanging out in an environment where it is an accepted part of the dominant framework, is more likely to be receptive to anarchism and seek it out. That is why there are still a lot of anarchists coming from the punk scene. Punk has a strong historical connection with anarchism and it is culturally integrated into the subcultural discourse.
Anyway, I hope that helped. I never know if I am saying the right thing or even answering your questions adequately, because you ask some really good questions.
I hope all is well,
Mark
