Author: Nicky Reid
Translation: Aegis Mirijam
Editing: Ancap-tyan
Original text: The Panarchist Solution to a World Divided
In these days of epic collapse, as the established order rapidly disintegrates before our very eyes, humanity seems to be tearing itself apart, gravitating more and more toward the far right or the far left. And why the hell not? Poor people across the world are tired of the lying promises and blatant lies of the so-called moderates. The only thing the warring extreme camps seem to agree on is that the mass democracy of neoliberal globalism is a grand scam. A fraudulent gambling game where only the house wins. But now, the house itself is on fire.
Thus, we are witnessing a spectacle of populism from both the left and the right. A record number of young people are adopting the once-tainted label of socialism, but at the same time, various forms of caveman xenophobia, which once whispered only in backwater church parishes, are now becoming mainstream, brandished openly like Hermann Göring with his revolver. This is the time we live in now, but it has happened before. Whenever empires crumble, the well-oiled markets of state capitalism are put in danger. The people who stand to gain the most from the cataclysm find themselves in opposite corners of the ring. Stalinists and Nazis. Antifa and alt-rights. It is in these moments that the voice of Samuel L. Jackson, the prophetic DJ from Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” a classic analysis of urban unrest, rings in my ears. “Can we live together?! Can we live together?!!” I have spent my entire life searching for the answer to this existential question. I feel I am getting closer to it.
I always found myself in the far left corner, even when the proletariat was still drunk on illusions of progress that came with the first black president and the commodity fetishism of the Apple Store. As a child, I discovered Marx, and shortly after, Chomsky. The lion’s share of my youth was spent flirting with the carousel of libertarian socialist ideologies: Chomsky’s syndicalism, Rosa Luxemburg’s council communism, the zapatismo of Subcomandante Marcos. All of this to the hard soundtrack of Billy Bragg, Joe Strummer, and Zack de la Rocha.
In late youth, I fell under the influence of more statist forms of leftism, triggered by the unexpected revival of Bolivarianism in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela and Evo Morales’s Bolivia. Eventually, I fell into the arms of Third World communism as a bastion of democratic social experiments against attacks from North America. I came to the conclusion that Fidel Castro’s harsh non-democratic measures to protect the Cuban Revolution after Kennedy’s terrorist campaign against it were the only solution to the problem of imperialism. But my taste for history would not allow me to hold onto this illusion for long. After further research, I concluded that the state itself is a cancerous tumor, and it doesn’t matter how benevolent its leaders are. It has always been a malevolent device designed to oppress others and eventually devour itself. I returned to anarchism, but contradictions continued to haunt me.
The biggest problem with almost every school of leftism is its almost messianic assumption that humanity can be united in internationalist harmony under the banner of a single path. No matter how strongly I believed that my own post-Marxist syndicalism was the ideal model for a truly democratic society, it was hard to convince myself that humanity would ever reach a special collective consciousness and merge into a single union. Honestly, as an anti-imperialist, I always felt awkward about these kinds of notions of internationalism.
The assumption that some 19th-century factory workers in industrial Western Europe had all the recipes for my friendly primitivist neighbors from the Amish community, let alone the tribes of Borneo or the Kalahari, simply reeks of colonialism. When the world is so beautiful in its complexity, how can there be only one path? It felt like the same trap that led our Founding Fathers to pave the way for the neoliberal hell of global capitalism, only our trap was tied to the Manifesto of Equality. I believed strongly in the ideals of Murray Bookchin and Rudolf Rocker, but because of these contradictions, I could view even my own anarchism as nothing more than a distant, unattainable dream. Until I discovered the philosophy of panarchy.
One of the biggest misconceptions about anarchism is that it is defined by the absence of government. Such a notion is clearly absurd. Governments have always existed, exist now, and will continue to exist. Government is any assembly of people who come together to make collective decisions. Technically, three stoned roommates discussing pizza toppings are a government. Anarchy is defined by the absence of the State—a permanent government run by a class of professional politicians, whether they be corporate board members, congressmen, or monarchs. The very existence of this managerial class turns a simple government into a State. Anarchy in all its forms seeks to destroy this hierarchy and replace it with a fully civilian government. Panarchy, then, is the recognition that in our world, in this diverse cultural landscape known as humanity, there is no single answer to a disaster like the State. Anarchy can only exist beyond manifestos and punk-rock venues when it is free to take any form, with any adjectives attached to the word “anarchy,” as long as it happens voluntarily and without coercion.
Globalism has brought nothing but colossal superpowers. The tyranny of large sizes: big government, big business, big people, big religion. This problem cannot be solved by seizing these systems and rebranding them in the key of internationalism. The only correct antidote to this tyranny of the masses is localism, and that is exactly what panarchy is: the idea that government should be based only on the same foundations as any other relationship—through voluntary contracts with the possibility of termination, with voluntarism and non-aggression toward all others as the core ideas. These could be mutual aid societies, autonomous communes, democratic syndicates, tribal structures, a patchwork quilt of endless utopian experiments peacefully competing for the right to patronize their citizens—while preserving the right of individuals to opt out of these services and the right of new collectives to enter the competition at any time. Ideally, these governments would exist as social clubs providing certain benefits, completely untethered from geography. This makes the existence of six stateless nations on one landing entirely possible.
What’s the catch, you ask? There is always a catch. The catch is that the freedom of society exists on the same principles as freedom of speech. Panarchy protects not only the societies you like, but also those you hate. According to the main contract of the Confederation Constitution, people will be free to build societies based on any ideology, as long as they remain peaceful and voluntary. This means societies based on mutualism, syndicalism, capitalism, and communism. But it also more than likely means peaceful nations governed by ideologies such as religious fundamentalism, geographic unity, and even racial separatism. Allowing such societies to exist does not mean accepting them any more than freedom of speech means accepting hate speech. We will have to accept the reality that true freedom means respecting the decisions of others, however mistaken, to live voluntarily as they see fit, provided they do so peacefully—much like my Amish neighbors with their kinship society, who peacefully coexist with sinful English trans people like me.
This philosophy anathematizes the current culture of both the far left and the far right, whose essence seems to be reduced to loud protest against the very existence of everyone else. But I view the catch described above as the solution to the problem of the proletariat, which will always be torn apart by the cultural agenda. When right-wing fascists lack the elegant shield of the persecuted victim, they tend to lose their appeal to the masses. Every time one of these little shits gets beaten up by Antifa, their book sales skyrocket to fucking heaven. I believe in the Kropotkin theory that free mutual aid will evolutionarily lead the left to a society of equality. Under conditions of peaceful competition, more aggressive cultures based on fear will shrink, while those open to cooperation will thrive. The beauty is that the ultrarights are free to believe the same thing about my tribe of queer syndicalists. They get the chance to prove me wrong, just as I do to them, but we will all be too small to spend our energy on fighting. For micro-nations, any prolonged war means mutually assured destruction. Coexistence becomes the only sustainable way of existence.
And I believe that this is exactly how we can live together: communists and nationalists, melting-pot ideologues and isolationists—together we can live. Behind every apocalypse hides an opportunity for a utopia. The panarchist asks: why not a thousand? Indeed, why not? After all, now is the perfect time…
