why don't anarchists get along?:(
q: if anarchists can’t even get along with each other in a Discord server/Zine distro/mutual aid group/etc., how do you expect to maintain working medical infrastructure and production?
a: Because even when we don’t get along in our organizing and care related spaces, anarchist conflict is generative, and (in the language of prefiguration) is an integral part of living in an anarchic way. Not just in the sense of being able to practice transformative justice, but in that anarchy itself is necessarily amorphous and (at least in terms of universal love) inherent, and disagreement over how to articulate it only make our organizing and shared values stronger.
Some of the anarchist organizers reading this might not necessarily believe it—especially during this politically fraught year, we’ve all dealt with inordinate amounts of infighting, ranging from overt bigotry (i.e. the segment of the anarchist community that seems to think being gay is counter-revolutionary) to debates over theory (we all know a guy who won’t shut up about Proudhon) to wildly different tactics (do we engage in direct mutual aid or just fundraise for a nonprofit?). Many of us have regular disagreements about Palestine solidarity—just the other night at a punk show, I ended up having a spirited debate with someone about the role of nonprofits such as MECA and JVP as opposed to affinity groups—and about how to address the recent onslaught of anti-trans legislation, and about reproductive rights, and…you get the gist. And that’s not even getting to the fact that it’s election season, and we’re all freaking exhausted. But as weird as things are, it’s always been this way in the anarchist community.
In 1926, egoist anarchist Emile Armand wrote in “Without Amoralization, No Anarchization” on this theme, which could be about today’s organizing spaces…
I read and hear it claimed that anarchism is beset by a crisis. This is not precisely correct. In truth, there is a conflict between the static and dynamic conceptions of anarchism, between those who want to gregarize and stabilize anarchism and those who want the revolutionary, individualist spirit to remain and simmer permanently within anarchism. At base, it is more a question of two methods than of two ideas. It would be extraordinary if a competition did not exist between them. It is precisely because they compete that, far from being stagnant, anarchism asserts itself, develops, expands and surpasses the narrowness of a church or a party.
As Armand explains it, anarchist infighting isn’t because we actually disagree that much about anarchy—it’s an outgrowth of the statist attitudes we internalize, the impetus to make our theory and practice more standardized, orderly, contained. It is not anarchy that leads to infighting, nor is it anarchy that should concern us on the grounds that infighting is inevitable—rather, it is internalized statism.
How can we resolve internalized statist ideas in our communities? To be fully honest, I’ve only ever seen anarchists grow from this by engaging in loving and supportive conflictuality (often in spaces based around this type of theory and meta-analysis—these conversations can be deeply disruptive in situations of direct action, as well as missing the point). So we can’t always get along in our Discord servers, zine distros, and mutual aid projects; those are the spaces where we learn to relate in an anarchic way, and thus, the spaces that enable anarchist relating when it’s more necessary (such as in medical and administrative settings). Anarchy is generative, and living under statism means we all internalize this type of harm—therefore, it is only in anarchist spaces that we can unlearn it.