“Anarchism… is a way of conceiving life,
and life… is not something definitive: it is a stake we must play day
after day. When we wake up in the morning and put our feet on the ground we
must have a good reason for getting up. If we don’t it makes no
difference whether we are anarchists or not… And to have a good reason we
must know what we want to do…”—Alfredo M. Bonanno
Perhaps one of the most difficult concepts that
I have tried to express in Willful Disobedience is that of anarchist
projectuality. The difficulty in expressing this concept does not merely stem
from the fact that the word is unusual. Far more significant is the fact that
the concept itself stands in total opposition to the way in which this social
order trains us to exist.
In this society, we are taught to view life as
something that happens to us, something that exists outside of us, into which
we are thrown. We are not, however, told that this is the result of a process
of dispossession, and so this alienation appears to be natural, an inevitable
consequence of being alive. When life is perceived in this way, the vast
majority of people simply deal with circumstances as they come along, for the
most part simply accepting their lot, occasionally protesting specific
situations, but in precisely those ways that acceptance of a pre-determined,
alienated existence permits. A few people take a more managerial approach to
this alienated existence. Rather than simply dealing with circumstances as they
come, they seek to reform alienated existence along programmatic lines,
creating blueprints for a modified existence, but one that is still determined
in advance into which individuals must be fitted.
One can find examples of both of these
tendencies within the anarchist movement. The first tendency can be seen in
those anarchists who conceive of revolution as an event that will hopefully
eventually happen to them when the masses arise, and who in the meantime face
their life with a kind of pragmatic, circumstantial immediatism. A principled
anarchist practice is considered “impossible” and is sacrificed to
the amelioration of immediate conditions “by any means necessary”
– including litigation, petition to the authorities, the promotion of
legislation and so on. The second tendency manifests in such programmatic
perspectives as platformism, libertarian municipalism and anarcho-syndicalism.
These perspectives tend to reduce revolution to a question of how the economic,
political and social institutions that control our lives are to be managed.
Reflecting the methods by which people cope with alienated existence, neither
of these methods actually challenges such an existence.
Anarchist projectuality starts with the
decision to reappropriate life here and now. It, therefore, immediately and
forcefully exposes and challenges the process of dispossession that this
society imposes and acts to destroy all the institutions of domination and
exploitation. This decision is not based on whether this reappropriation is
presently possibly or not, but on the recognition that it is the absolutely
necessary first step for opening possibilities for the total transformation of
existence. Thus when I speak of anarchist projectuality, I am speaking of a way
of facing life and struggle in which the active refusal of alienated existence
and the reappropriation of life are not future aims, but are one’s
present method for acting in the world.
Anarchist projectuality cannot exist as a
program. Programs are based on the idea of social life as a thing separated
from the individuals that make it up. They define how life is to be and strive
to make individuals fit into this definition. For this reason, programs have
little capacity for dealing with the realities of everyday life and tend to
confront the circumstances of living in a ritualized and formalized
manner. Anarchist projectuality exists instead as a consciously lived
tension toward freedom, as an ongoing daily struggle to discover and create the
ways to determine one’s existence with others in uncompromising
opposition to all domination and exploitation.
So anarchist projectuality does confront the
immediate circumstances of an alienated daily existence, but refuses the
circumstantial pragmatism of “by any means necessary”, instead
creating means that already carry the ends within themselves. To clarify what I
mean, I will give a hypothetical example. Let’s take the problem of the
police. We all know that the police intrude upon the lives of all of the
exploited. It is not a problem that can be ignored. And, of course, as
anarchists, we want the destruction of the police system in its totality. A
programmatic approach to this would tend to start from the idea that we must
determine the essential useful tasks that police supposedly carry out
(controlling or suppressing “anti-social” behavior, for example).
Then we must try to create self-managed methods for carrying out these tasks
without the police, rendering them unnecessary. A pragmatic, circumstantial
approach would simply examine all the excesses and atrocities of the police and
seek to find ways of ameliorating those atrocities – through lawsuits, the
setting up of civilian police review boards, proposals for stricter legislative
control of police activity, etc. Neither of these methodologies, in fact,
questions policing as such. The programmatic methodology simply calls for
policing to become the activity of society as a whole carried out in a
self-managed manner, rather than the task of a specialized group. The
pragmatic, circumstantial approach actually amounts to policing the police, and
so increases the level of policing in society. An anarchist projectual approach
would start from the absolute rejection of policing as such. The problem with
the police system is not that it is a system separate from the rest of society,
nor that it falls into excesses and atrocities (as significant as these are).
The problem with the police system is inherent to what it is: a system for
controlling or suppressing “anti-social” behavior, i.e., for
conforming individuals to the needs of society. Thus, the question in play is
that of how to destroy the police system in its totality. This is the starting
point for developing specific actions against police activity. Clear
connections have to be made between every branch of the system of social
control. We need to make connections between prison struggles and the struggles
of the exploited where they live (including the necessity of illegality as a
way of surviving with some dignity in this world). We need to clarify the
connections between the police system, the legal system, the prison system, the
war machine – in other words between every aspect of the system of
control through which the power of capital and the state is maintained. This
does not mean that every action and statement would have to explicitly express
a full critique, but rather that this critique would be implicit in the
methodology used. Thus, our methodology would be one of autonomous direct
action and attack. The tools of policing surround us everywhere. The targets
are not hard to find. Consider, for example, the proliferation of video cameras
throughout the social terrain…
But this is simply an example to clarify
matters. Anarchist projectuality is, in fact, a confrontation with existence
“at daggers drawn” as one comrade so beautifully expressed it, a
way of facing life. But since human life is a life with others, the
reappropriation of life here and now must also mean the reappropriation of our
life together. It means developing relations of affinity, finding the
accomplices for carrying out our projects on our terms. And since the very
point of projectuality is to free ourselves here and now from the passivity
that this society imposes on us, we cannot simply wait for chance to bring
these people into our paths. This point is particularly important in the
present era, when public space is becoming increasingly monitored, privatized
or placed under state control, making chance meetings of any significance
increasingly impossible. This desire to find accomplices is what moves me to
publish Willful Disobedience. But it calls for other projects as well. Taking
back space – whether for an evening or on a more permanent basis –
for meeting and discussion, creating situations where real knowledge of each
other can be discovered and developed, is essential. And this cannot be
restricted to those who call themselves anarchists. Our accomplices may be
found anywhere among the exploited, where there are people fed up with their
existence who have no faith left in the current social order. For this reason,
discovering ways to appropriate public spaces for face-to-face interactions is
essential to the development of a projectual practice. But discussion in this
case is not aimed essentially at discovering a “common ground”
among all concerned. It is rather aimed at discovering specific affinities.
Therefore, discussion must be a frank, clear expression of one’s projects
and aims, one’s dreams and desires.
In short, anarchist projectuality is the
practical recognition in one’s life that anarchy is not just an aim for
the distant future, an ideal that we hope to experience in a far away utopia.
Much more essentially, it is a way of confronting life and struggle, a way that
puts us at odds with the world as it is. It is grasping our own lives as a
weapon and as a stake to be played against the existence that has been imposed
on us. When the intensity of our passion for freedom and our desire to make our
lives our own pushes us to live in a different manner, all the tools and
methods offered by this world cease to be appealing, because all that they can
do is adjust the machine that controls our lives. When we make the choice to
cease to be a cog, when we make the choice to break the machine rather than
continuing to adjust it, passivity ceases and projectuality begins.