Chapter Fourteen: Navigating Anarchism as Collaboration and Current Political World
Part One: Anarchism as Collaboration
Readings:
O’Connor, J. (1991). “Socialism and ecology”. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2(3), 1-12.
Key Dilemma of Part One:
Is anarchical-collaboration self-defeating by trying to create a collaborative society amongst people whose identity depends on having power and privilege over others?
Review of List of Navigation Strategies for Seemingly Intractable Conflicts, Differences, and Dilemmas:
Example to help us work through these dilemmas:
I have found that full equality in society, workplace, and home is something we can realistically strive for, and someday achieve. In my understanding of traditional indigenous cultures, it was everyone’s duty to protect tribal members. In turn, it was the tribe’s duty to foster maximum freedom and equality for each tribal member. There were tribal roles that needed to be fulfilled, and divisions of labor, which may have felt unfree and unequal to some members, but there was a general realization that the tribe could not function, at its most optimal level, unless tribal members were satisfied with their role, and their place within the division of labor. Certainly, within the longstanding traditions of tribes, certain discriminations, inequalities, and oppressions existed, historically; and which tribes are currently committed to overcome.
In my interactions with tribes, and my exposure to tribal philosophy, I am inspired to imagine a broader societal acceptance of collaboration and mutual aid, two the hallmarks of anarchism. Their sense of collaboration is demonstrated in tribal councils and their belief in the harmony of people with nature. They literally collaborate with nature in their rituals and practices. In this way, the tribal spirit is one of mutual aid.
One of our Native American graduate students designed a tribal program to better serve the needs of elder tribal members, who had become too isolated. The program was quickly accepted by tribal leaders and the tribal council in the spirit of mutual aid. For them, mutual aid is maximized by the shared wealth of holding property in common, outlawing private ownership of the means of production, while embracing personal property. These are the ultimate core elements of anti-capitalism, anarchism, socialism, and communism. All of these political philosophies agree that the realization of a truly just society is one where anarchy (anarkhos ‘without a chief’) means the flattening of all hierarchies and “power-over” relationships. The resulting society embraces “power-with” societies, where decisions are reached either through consensus, or direct democracy, as in ancient Athenian democracy, where citizens directly made policy, without any intermediary representation. Historically, anarchism is not something new or utopian, it has a long tradition for some people, and a realistic aspiration for other people, who have discovered that modern capitalism is freedom for the few and oppression for the many. The recent success of democratic socialism in the United States is an example of the power of campaigns for social and economic justice.
I have participated in many organizations that make decisions by consensus, and I worked in two long-term places of employment, where all decisions were made directly without representation. So, I have seen that this works, though it certainly was painstaking at times! I learned a lot about navigating difference in these settings, and a lot about collaborative conflict processes.
Other Voices:
“For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed hum (her), and turn them to social account.” (Rudolf Rocker)
‘[A]t every stage of history, our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified, in terms of the need for security or survival, or economic development, but that now contribute to—rather than alleviate—material and cultural deficit.” (Noam Chomsky, On Anarchism)
Questions:
1. Why should anarchism embrace collaboration as a central principle?
The enemy of anarchy is hierarchy or power-over. Anarchy seeks power-with, which has been popularized in feminist literature and scholarship, as well as the literature and scholarship of collaborative processes. Collaborative processes are expanding more deeply into society. Therefore, I am optimistic that collaboration is gaining a stronger, defining foothold in our mainstream culture.
With the increase in collaborative processes, hierarchies are flattened, and authority is decentralized. Teamwork, and mutual aid, replaces the pecking order and exploitation of hierarchy. As hierarchies are flattened, along with the diversification of workplaces and neighborhoods, oppression disappears. As oppression disappears, true freedom from tyranny emerges, with a population more deeply committed to productive and creative work. In this transition, people will become less dependent on the work of exploiters, managers, owners, and investors, which is not human-productive, but capital-intensive.
An example of how this works is a common neighborhood conflict, which happened near my home. A neighbor planned to repaint her fence that divides her property from ours. It is her fence, so she feels entitled to paint both sides whatever she feels will fit her overall home color scheme. We find out that that color will clash with the stain on our other fencing, so we ask that she not paint on our side of the fence. As a hasty resolution, she decided to avoid the conflict by leaving our side of the fence unpainted.
What we could have done is agree to carefully stain our side of her fence, so that it would not need refinishing for many years. This would protect her from the problem reemerging, when in the future, we might have less carefully stained our side of the fence, leaving her to fix any stain that dripped onto her side of the fence. This agreement would have been more collaborative and contributed to the experience of mutual aid. It also would have avoided any intervention from our neighborhood association or any other governing agency. An anarchist victory!
2. How can collaborative anarchism create a revolution which win-wins our way to moral growth and social progress?
People often equate the term, “anarchism,” with the violent overthrow of the state. This pejorative view demonizes anarchism as chaos and disorder for the sake of chaos and disorder, a return to the Hobbes’ view that the pre-civilized state of nature was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” However, we have found that pre-civilized tribes live and often lived highly collaborative, abundant, and healthy lives, hardly solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Getting past the negative press, anarchism actually refers to living without the extreme hierarchies and power-over dynamics of civilized life—which actually commit everyone to a state of anxiety and insecurity, and ensure that the ever-increasing homeless population are living lives that are, indeed, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Anarchism seeks to create a highly collaborative society, filled with the dynamics of mutual aid. As people become more committed to collaborative processes and mutual aid, there will be less and less need for the overarching power of the state, the wealthy, and the business class. The state, private ownership of the means of production, and the wealth divide will “wither away” In fact, there have always been people committed to collaborative processes and mutual aid. As conflict workers, our commitment to collaborative processes, everywhere in society, is promoting this kind of egalitarian anarchy. Our collaborative efforts expand an existing revolution, through each collaborative conflict process; which in turn, creates stronger ties between disputants.
These stronger ties, added to commitments for mutual aid, increase our sense of security, while lowering our anxiety. Higher security and lessened anxiety will create a positive generator for change. With this momentum, public ownership can nonviolently expand to the necessities of life, direct democracy can begin to replace representative democracy, and a horizontal network of workers’ councils will begin to deliver the Marxist morality of “from each according to his (her) ability, to each according to his (her) needs”.
Anarchy, as a socialist ideal, has suffered from its denigration as a cult of violence, dedicated to the precipitous overthrow of the rich and powerful. Revolutions of this kind created vanguard political parties that easily became a new group of bosses, replacing an old group of bosses (as musically illustrated by the Who’s song, “Won’t Get Fooled Again,”) In addition, the idea of a network of workers councils has also demonized the bosses, when these leaders might find that collaboration is more in their humane interests than the usual practices of inhumane domination.
3. It seems like self-interested adversariality, and competition for greater status, power, and wealth, is going to make any transition to a collaborative, mutual aid society quite slow and difficult. How could it be accelerated?
Publicly funding collaborative governance processes, as well as other levels of mediation and facilitation, combined with public funded mutual aid projects must become part of the political dialogue. All political parties need to endorse these processes and projects. If people have more security and their needs are heard, there will be less reason for people to fight, deceive, accumulate wealth, and seek power over others. Ultimately, we need to transition to a society where generosity and security replace self-centeredness and competition for excessive wealth, power, and status. We need to find a balance between freedom-from poverty and insecurity, and freedom-to create a life of community and meaning.
Collaborative processes can lead the way to that nonviolent revolution, where inhumanity is replaced with humanity.
4. Doesn’t it seem like any transition to a more communitarian society is essentially a cultural revolution that must be global, just as the capitalist economy has become global?
Given the interconnectedness of the modern world, local change can move virally to global change. Even in the 1960s, when there was not internet, revolutionary changes were happening globally.
