WHY CAN'T
ANARCHISTS BE
ANARCHISTS
When people make the choice to call themselves
anarchists, I assume they mean that they are
making a choice about how they want to go about
their lives, their projects and the creation of
revolution. There are plenty of other perspectives
on how to go about creating social transformation,
that there is no need for those who don’t wish to go
about their projects in an anarchist manner to use
that label. Thus, when I went to the anarchist
conference in L.A., I was disappointed, not in the
level of discussion or the sort of people who
showed up—I had no expectations for the former
and am aware enough of the general make-up of
the anarchist movement to expect a predominantly
young white turn-out for such a thing. What
disappointed me was that the conference itself was
not organized in an anarchist manner.
When people call themselves anarchists, they are
stating that they absolutely reject all state
institutions, all external rule and all delegation of
the decisions relating to their lives and actions.
This is simply a most basic definition of what
anarchism is. On a practical level, this means that
in creating our projects, we refuse to imitate state
institutions, we avoid making hard and fast rules
and we only make decisions that relate directly to
what is necessary for us to accomplish our
projects—not decisions that relate to or could affect
the actions of our comrades who are not involved in
the decision-making process. The NAAC fails on all
counts.
I recognize that planning a continental anarchist
conference is a difficult task. If anything though I
would think that such a daunting task would move
those involved to try and make it as simple as
possible for themselves—limiting their activities to
arranging a space and possibly—out of
hospitality—some food, taking care of publicity and
scheduling, and being available to give people
information about what was going on. In other
words, it would have made sense—from both an
anarchist and a practical perspective—if the
organizers had stuck to simply organizing the event
and not trying to organize beforehand the behavior
of those who came.
When I came to the place where the conference
was taking place, I was immediately confronted with
a sign telling me that I was not allowed to drink or
take drugs and was to avoid talking about illegal
activities. I had never been given a say in these
restrictions—they were rules made over my
head—that is to say, laws. I was not greeted or
welcomed as a comrade when I entered, but was
rather met with the demand to register—a demand
that included pressure to pay an exorbitant $25.
Even most border guards in other countries that I
have entered will at least say “Good morning! How
are you?” before demanding that you check in. I felt
as if I were entering some bureaucratic nightmare,
not a gathering of anarchists intent on developing
their own revolutionary project. The plethora of
people apparently doing security was equally
unnerving. When one adds that the organizing
collective also made the decision to invite the
press—a decision that quite clearly goes beyond
what is necessary to the practical organizing of the
conference—it is clear that the organizers in fact on
a practical level chose to act as a governing body
of the conference, not merely as its organizers.
From the way the conference was structured, it is
clear that the organizers, like so many within the
anarchist milieu, have made a fetish of security.
Certainly, when one is in the process of taking
illegal action, one needs to consider precautions to
prevent arrest, but when we extend this way of
thinking to the totality of life and to the way we go
about all of our projects, then the state has won.
And this isn’t mere rhetoric. Constant security
consciousness is the mentality of the state and
capital—it is the constant visibility of the cop on the
street; it is the ever-ready nuclear weapons system;
it is the security guard walking the aisles of every
major store, sitting at the desk at the front of the
library or the welfare office; it is the INS at the
border. And it is also the anarchist who immediately
confronts you at the door of conference requiring
you to register with less courtesy than a border
guard, or the black-clad shithead who interrupts a
workshop to point out someone suspiciously just
because they don’t look like a typical anarchist.
The culture we live in—the culture of the state and
capital—is a security culture. When we let that
same mentality come to dominate our way of doing
things, we end up imitating the state and that is
what the organizers of this conference
did—creating rules of behavior for others, setting
up an imposing security system, requiring
registration—and allowing all of this to take
precedence over comradely welcomes and making
people feel at home.
Having been an anarchist for almost 25 years now,
I have been to a few anarchist gatherings (including
the one in Long Beach in 1992). The others I have
been to were organized by people who gave priority
to comradeship and hospitality and to the smooth
running of the gathering itself. There were no rules
imposed —except if a space itself required it (and
even then the “rule” was more one of not getting
caught breaking the rules of the space)—, instead
problems that arose were dealt with on the spot. If
there was registration it was voluntary, for the
purpose of providing housing and adequate food. It
was not as a security measure. The organizers
made no decisions that did not deal directly with the
practical necessities of organizing the conference.
And any security that may have existed to watch for
possible police raids were amazingly
invisible—apparently feeling no need to come
across as counter-cops in a lame attempt to scare
off undercovers. And these gatherers generally
went along smoothly, in a friendly manner. They, in
fact, showed that it was possible to accomplish
even a complex task such as organizing a gathering
of several hundred to a few thousand (in the case
of the San Francisco gathering of 1989) people in
an anarchist manner. Of all the anarchist
gatherings I want to the one that just happened in
Los Angeles came across as the most bureaucratic
and the least well-organized.
If there is such a thing as an anarchist revolutionary
project—that is a projectuality toward a world
without authority or capitalism—it can only be
accomplished by using specifically anarchist
methods, but if we cannot even gather a few
hundred anarchists together without resorting to
authoritarian, state-like methods of organizing,
because we have let our minds be permeated by
the same security-first mentality on which the state
operates and by a media-induced sense of
self-importance (we are so American, aren’t we?),
how do we ever expect to bring about such a
revolution. Before organizing such events, before
publishing our papers, before taking part in
demonstrations or other events, before taking any
action, each of us as individuals need to clarify just
what our revolutionary project is, just what it is we
are really aiming for as anarchists and as
revolutionaries, so that each individual project we
do will be within the context of our revolutionary
projectuality and will use a methodology in keeping
with the aims we proclaim. If we do not do this we
will keep on blundering about, all too often imitating
those we call our enemies. Such blundering is
precisely what the organizers of the NAAC did and
it made the Los Angeles conference the least
enjoyable one I have ever been to.