I’ve had trouble figuring out what kind of anarchist I am. I’ve been close to comfortable with anarchosocialism, and knowing how much ecological damage is caused by the war machine keeps pulling me closer to green. Ancap, if it’s different from the status quo at all, just has the status quo as its end state. I feel like anarchosyndicalism might just be an older word for the same thing. I haven’t read enough to know about other models.
But I have a problem with green anarchy, and I feel like most who identify as anarchosocialists are into this as well: degrowth. Just to begin with, I don’t think it’s meaningfully different from anarchoprimitivism. Prof. Kaczynski is right about alot of things, but there are moral consequences of luddism and antinatalism that I can’t accept. I’ve been yelled at for equating degrowth with those things, but every time I hear anyone who likes it talking about it, it sounds more like that to me. Either people are not thinking about what the phrase “economic growth” means, or they think nobody would like it if they came out and said it. The left has corpospeak, too.
I also wouldn’t know who Kaczynski is other than “a terrorist” without the Internet. That might not be a tech that inherently favors centralization, but mining and chip manufacture sure are. With anprim, and I’d argue with any kind of degrowth, civilization will be asking the same questions in a couple thousand years, tops, and eventually we’ll get the wrong answer. As many times as it takes, until we’re dead. One benefit of modern technology is that we could, in a certain sense, see the “end of history,” simply because we’ll remember enough of it to stop repeating it. That phrase is frightening now because it’s very easy and profitable to end history the other way: to make us do nothing but repeat the part that does the most harm.
But leaving aside whether you still append “under capitalism” to “there is no ethical consumption,” there’s something I hate about degrowth much more: it cannot happen without force. If you want to reduce what the average person uses and get them to stop having kids, you’re taking away why they live, and they’re more likely to fight you for it than commit suicide. Degrowth is a soft, lefty word for austerity and depopulation, and that can only happen through authoritarianism. Power will always behave as it does; depopulation will always mean the wealthy telling the rest of humanity “there need to be less of you.” This already happens, after all. Nobody in the existing power structure wants the economy to stop growing, but plenty of them would love to lower the birth rate. It’s one of the few things there is genuine disagreement about at that level of society.
This strikes at a deeper problem with anarchy as a whole: whether they’re nasty evil capitalists or people who have been misled by same, the vast majority of people currently want to be part of The Great Work. This includes millions of people who have been fully convinced that the current shape of civilization is going to destroy the planet. Greenwashing wouldn’t be a thing, otherwise. Because these people want to live in a society, one with industry and cities and, for some of them, even militaries, attacks on the system are attacks on their cultural identity. You can’t save demons from hell. They like it there.
So, we’re stuck in a very difficult position: we have to respond to the world order, because it’s become an existential threat to life on earth. Asking people politely to stop breeding and buying video games isn’t going to work. Doing more than that is the path back to autocracy. What do we do?
I suppose I might call myself a proponent of green growth, but I know that on a long enough timescale, that’s not a real thing. The best you can do is “green enough” that the existential threat is further in the future than your ability to colonize space. But then, isn’t the growth necessary to be able to do that, and doesn’t that have the potential to actually solve the problem? Space programs are unpopular with degrowthers for pretty obvious reasons, but the planet being a lifeless cinder and the coffin of every species that lived on it carries the same moral weight to me, whether it’s caused by climate change, nuclear war, or the sun getting too old. Degrowth takes much longer to get there, but it doesn’t even try to alter that outcome. If that’s morally correct, then gambling on things that might get us there faster but also might change the outcome are not morally incorrect.
Federation is a part of many anarchist models, but I don’t believe most anarchists really consider what it would mean to be both federated and truly anarchic. Anarchocapitalism isn’t really anarchy; that is exactly why it might be possible to get recovering capitalists to give it a try. A major redeeming feature of most of the ancap rhetoric I’ve seen is that, even if they think other flavors of anarchy are repackaged statism, I don’t think they’d see a need to try to smash the ansoc “state” the next town over if there were ever a sudden outbreak of decentralization. These are the “am I being detained” people, after all. They get the importance of the freedom to leave. They think they can just outcompete models that aren’t obsessed with competition, and in the short term they’ll be right and lots of people will want to live that way. They very nearly already do.
So, I have a flag. The rest of this article will explain it, as I believe its symbolism is actually a better way to say what I mean than the words I’ve written so far. This flag incorporates onlinewebfonts.com/icon/506220, licensed under CCBY 3.0.
To me, this flag represents the next step in human civilization, should we succeed in defeating the existing global kleptocracy. It’s not an end goal. I’m not sure I can imagine a positive “end state” for human existence. I think there must be one, but it’s beyond this model, beyond my reckoning. That is the main reason the yellow is there. A human society that moves beyond empire must involve a kind of unity between the various kinds of anarchy. This isn’t a call for civility; I’m not telling you to do it on a personal level unless you feel like it helps you do what you want to do. Rather, this is an observation that transitional states with some degree of centralization, profiteering, and force will be a part of human civilization for a long time after we finally decide to stop living in a global temple to those ideas.
The yellow doesn’t reach to the edge of the flag. I do not hope or believe it will be here forever. To me, ancaps’ place in the world to come is to watch others flourish, and to come around in their own time. That’s never going to happen by refusing to cooperate with them, just as I believe we have to sell the abandonment of empire to the existing imperialists.
I’ve made their part of the flag a tree as a kind of reminder to those who currently favor degrowth: growth is a natural force to which we owe life, livelihood, and liveliness. Capitalism’s redeeming quality is that it’s all about growth. In the event of its death, ancaps will be the ones most likely to band together and keep things like electricity and spaceflight alive. Concede that territory to them completely, and they will outcompete the rest of us. If we finally ever meet anyone else out among the stars, they’ll be really confused as to why the Ferengi aren’t the protagonist race in Star Trek. Do you want that?
In summary, an anarchopolitan advocates for a system where the weirdos who like authority can have a little bit of it, as a treat. Its name derives from the historical fact that cities are something most humans are simply prone to do, and their construction always creates some system of authority. We can’t stop that from happening, but from where we are now, we might be able to get cities to agree to keep their laws to themselves. There’s no need to smash the state if we can get it to agree to stop smashing us for trying to live without it. The Civil Network and the Global Protectorate are how I would implement such a system.
It could be said that the idea of trying to coexist with people who are statists in their heart is absurd. As I say, power will behave as it does. Of course they will break these agreements, of course they will try to build empires. Half the reason I believe we might be able to get the existing authorities to abdicate is that they know they’re the ones best situated to pick up the pieces of this collapsing world order. They’ll think I’m basically asking for nothing in this negotiation. Trying to have an “anarchic” federation that allows anything like capitalism or statism in it is just moving the problem, and we’d spend eternity almost hopelessly ripping out weeds of corruption and autocracy that constantly threaten to disenfranchise those who just wanted to live in the middle of nowhere subsistence farming with their friends.
Permanent revolution, in other words.