"Seeing Past the Outpost of Post-Anarchism"

Sandra Jeppesen

I am excited that there is a debate, if not raging,
then at least taking place, about the politics of
contemporary anarchist theory. Rather than engage in
any of the particulars of the debate, however -- by
asserting, for example, that the postanarchism debate
is not rooted enough in the contemporary anarchist
movement, or that it seems to be neglecting important
aspects of anarchist culture, or that it generalizes
'anarchism' and 'post-structuralism' according to the
needs of the debate rather than the particulars of the
authors from whom specific ideas have emanated, or
that actually anarchism is not somewhere between
liberalism and Marxism, or that actually there is no
crisis in representation in the anarchist movement
today, or that 'traditional anarchism', anarchism as
the centre of the anti-globalization movement,
anarchist administrative bureaucracy, or the anarchist
a priori on power, are all oxymorons, etc. -- I would
like to take a different approach to the debate on
contemporary anarchist theory (or what some people are
trying to call postanarchism).What I think is sorely needed in the debate on
anarchist political theory today, is a deep look into
the sparkling eyes of the anarchist movement, and an
engagement with the debates that are raging in
on-the-ground organizing circles and people's lived
revolutionary practices. This is a massive project,
and while I am not interested in or even capable of
coming up with a load of solutions for anarchist
politics today, what I would like to do is suggest
some starting points for investigation, if anarchist
theory is to remain or even become relevant to anarchy
as it is practiced in the streets today.

Axiom X. Anarchism is not a white movement.
Imperative reading for any anarchist theorist
includes: an excellent article by Elizabeth Martinez
called, "Where Was the Color in Seattle?" outlining
some of the issues of the condescending ways in which
white people try to organize (with) people of colour,
and issues that need to be addressed by white
anarchists in order to be good allies with people of
colour. There is also a Colors of Resistance
collective, zine and website, an Anarchist People of
Color website an excellent book by Lorenzo Kom'boa
Ervin called Anarchism and the Black Revolution, and
the Raise the Fist website, just for starters. Any
anarchist analysis will have to include an anti-racist
analysis that looks at the current organizing and
debates being put forward by people of colour in
general and anarchists of colour specifically.

Axiom 6. Anarchism is not a movement of two-gendered
heterosexual monogamy.
Emma Goldman put sexuality, free love, non-monogamy,
and the struggle for control over our own bodies on
the anarchist map almost a hundred years ago. Today
gender queer anarchists are everywhere. Sexuality,
sexual orientation, gender and sex are important
constitutive practices in anarchist culture.
Non-monogamy, polyamory, radical monogamy, pangender,
transgender, and a whole range of new sex and gender
categories of resistance, or resistances to
categorization that challenge traditional gender and
sex roles as defined by sexism, heterosexism,
heteronormativity and the male-female or
masculine-feminine binaries are debates and practices
that rage on in anarchist collectives and gatherings.
We are reading post-structuralist gender and sex
theorists such as Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, and
we are writing everything from zines to poetry to
theory books on the subject. But more than this, we
are living it in our multitudes and varieties of daily
(and nightly!) practices. A contemporary anarchist
theory will have to engage this terrain, and
conceptualize the body as a crucial space of struggle.

Axiom j. Anarchism is not a movement of colonization.
If post-colonialism is a theoretical terrain that, in
at least some of its forms, theorizes contemporary
struggles against colonialism, then indigenous
sovereignty struggles may be seen as an aspect of its
practice. Anarchists have formed alliances with
indigenous struggles for self-determination in places
such as Grassy Narrows, Cold Lake, etc. Ecoanarchists
such as the Elaho Valley Anarchist Horde demand the
return of all unceded indigenous territories. We're
reading Ward Churchill and Gord Hill, Redwire, and
white post-colonialist anarchists are looking to
groups like AIM, the Native Youth Movement, and the
Chiappas struggle for direction. An important debate
in this context is taking place around the concept of
nation-state. How does the indigenous sovereigntist
need to assert nationhood intersect with the anarchist
rejection of the nation-state? Anarchist theory must
reject colonialist Eurocentrism, and engage and form
alliances with indigenous struggles and theories.

Axiom a. Anarchy is not a movement of able-bodied,
healthy folks.
Disabled and differently-abled folks play an important
role in anarchist organizing. Health and wellness,
including mental health, need to be redefined to
eliminate debilitating assumptions of normativity.
Health and wellness need to be things we are all
working toward, and that we mutually support each
other in achieving, regardless of our ability levels,
mental health issues, allergies, etc. Each person
needs to be able to express and set boundaries around
our bodies and our physical emotional and mental
health, we need to be able to say when something is or
is not okay and have that respected by all. In our
organizing, we need to acknowledge the important
contributions of people of all ability levels, and to
continue facilitating inclusivity and accessibility.
People have the right to health, and we must ensure
that as a community we support this right without
making each other feel that we are needy or demanding;
rather each person's needs are paramount, and each
person has the right to define their own needs and
have those needs met. Anarchist theory must expand its
limited conception of inclusivity and address the
importance of theories of dis-ability and
different-ability.

Axiom £. Anarchy is not about a new type of Marxism.
Anarchism is not the poorer flat-footed sister of
Marxism. Anarchists made a break from Marxists when
Bakunin was ejected from the First International.
There is no going back, and who would want to anyway.
Anarchism rejects wholesale the dictatorship of the
proletariat, centralist statism, organizations with
central committees, the centrality of the economic,
and the many other forms of domination and
authoritarianism that can accompany Marxist thinking
and Socialist organizing. Perhaps the disarray of the
left bemoaned by post-Marxists is actually another
kind of organization, an explosion of thousands of
small groups committed to the radical transformation
of society, which old-school leftists and their
centralist model haven't quite figured out how to
read. Anarchy is not some kind of new third way for
discombobbled leftists clinging to the sinking ship of
their outmoded thinking. Anarchy is a way of life, a
practice of living that is based on freedom from
oppression and all forms of domination, on sharing
resources and transcending constraints. Anarchist
theory does not need to engage Marxist theory. To do
so would be to get stuck in the quagmire of Marxist
history; rather we need to escape history. Anarchy is
the creative free-spirited self-sustaining DIY
revolutionary distant cousin of Marxism. Marxism's
failed marriage with Communism may have led him to
think she's sexy (and she is!), but frankly, she's not
interested. "Let's be friends," she says.

Axiom q. Anarchy is not about the worker.
Most people don't like work. Why would we want to
organize our lives and our politics around something
we usually try to avoid? Workers' collectives are good
in that they try as much as possible to remove the
oppressive relationship inherent within the capitalist
conceptualization of work. But the products people
make, or the services they offer still have to slot
themselves into the capitalist system. Forget that.
Anarchy is about not working for other people at all.
It is about working for yourself. And I don't mean
self-employment in the tax collectors' definition.
What I mean is, working on your own garden so that you
can feed yourself, working on your own artwork,
videos, websites or writing so that you can express
yourself, working on building your own collective home
so that you can house yourself, working on
relationships and learning things that are relevant to
your life, working on your sexuality so that you can
please yourself. Working for other people is no fun,
and an identity based on the exploited role you play
in sustaining capitalism is no identity at all. Fuck
work. And read Bob Black. Anarchist theory has to move
away from Marxist notions of the reified category of
worker, and consider the possibilities of creating a
world without poverty in a world without work.

Axiom //. Anarchism is not a men's movement.
That's capitalism. Anarchism is a movement full of
women. Strong women, feisty women, women committed to
struggle. Women who go to the fence, who withstand
tear gas, police brutality, rubber bullets, pepper
spray and keep on fighting. Women who freight hop,
build houses, hitchhike, have multiple partners, and
also keep the home fires burning, take care of each
other and each other's children, listen carefully as
people speak, build consensus, share resources.
Anarchafeminism is about women being true equals with
men, and refusing to oppress others. It is not the
kind of feminism that wants to be a bank manager and
fight the glass ceiling. It might throw a brick
through the glass ceiling and climb out of that tower
into the juicy purple evening sky. Read L. Susan Brown
on anarchafeminism in Reinventing Anarchy, Again.
Read Shoot the Women First. Men may talk louder, jump
in front of microphones more, prostitute themselves to
the media more, and hog the computer (and by the
way -- stop that!) but they are not running the show.
Nobody is running the show. Anarchist theory will have
to include considerations of anarchafeminism, and not
as an afterthought or an additional chapter (like,
oops! almost forgot the women/queers/people of
colour/indigenous folks/disabled folks) but in
understanding the crucial role women (queers/people of
colour/indigenous folks/disabled folks) play in
anarchist organizing structures, theoretical
development, direct action tactics, anti-oppression
commitments, cultural production, etc.

Axiom &. Anarchists use language differently.
CrimethInc.'s book Days of War, Nights of Love lists
as part of their "Table of Discontents," a
"CrimethInc. Contra-diction-ary." These sections look
at some of the old ways language is used, disused or
abused, and formulate new revolutionary ways of
understanding things like ideology and the media, that
contradict the past. In our day to day, anarchists use
language differently. We use the term 'regular' when
we mean that the way a person is being is okay,
instead of the term 'normal' with the oppressive
psychoanalytical discourse of normativity it implies,
which anarchists reject. We use the term 'queer' as a
positive term to imply gender revolutionaries. We use
the term 'trans' to mean that a person has
transitioned or is in the process of transitioning
their gender and/or their sex. We use the word,
'spectacular' not to mean that something was really
great, but kind of the opposite -- that it was all just a
big spectacle with no possibility of participation by
regular folks. We use the term 'folks' to refer to
people who are our allies in struggle. We use the term
'allies' to indicate folks who are engaged in a
struggle we support and show solidarity for and are
supported by, and to indicate that this relationship
is mutual and non-dominational. We use the term 'white
supremacy' not in the KKK sense of the term (ie. let's
get whites into power) but rather to indicate that
white people are already in power in North America,
and that this is a bad thing. There are many other
terms anarchists use in a particular way, and the way
we use language is an important part of our struggle.
The importance of discourse and semiotics within
post-structuralism may be useful in developing an
anarchist semiotics.

Axiom life. Anarchy is about social permaculture -- the
ways in which we live together.
Anarchism is about living collectively with other
people; decisions being made as nearly as possible by
the people who must implement them and live with their
consequences; it is about mutual aid and sharing
resources and long-term self-sustainability; it is
about the good of one being irrefutably linked to and
therefore exactly the same as the good of all. In this
sense, anarchist practice can include a car
collective, a housing collective, a permaculture land
collective, a community garden collective, a health
care collective, a bookfair collective, an anarchist
reading circle, a bike share network, a computer
workers' co-op, a free skool, a free university, a day
care share, etc. Anarchist theory must consider the
multiple forms of anarchist social permaculture
practice that are out there, and how they challenge
coercive force relations of the social.

Axiom now. Anarchy is a struggle for the present
moment.
Anarchy is about living passionately in the present
moment; it is about desire and love and freedom and
creativity. It is a bike ride with six of your best
friends down a rutted and gutted dirt road along the
tracks. It is a guerrilla garden, an indymedia site, a
surveillance camera theatre group, an art show where
people tear down the walls and then bathe in a vat of
expensive champagne, a thrown brick breaking a cop's
collarbone, a party where everyone dances naked on the
rooftops of abandoned corporate buildings or along the
shores of an ancient river in an old-growth forest.
Anarchy is about life. It's not about dead words on a
page written by a bunch of dead straight white guys.
Anarchist theory will have to engage Situationist (The Revolution of Everyday Life, etc.) and
post-Situationist texts (Days of War, Nights of Love
by CrimethInc., etc.) to consider what underlies the
vibrancy of the anarchist movement.

Axiom ~. Anarchy is about cultural production.
Anarchists make things, things that are not theory,
and not practice. Anarchists make art, and send it off
traveling around the country, like the Drawing
Resistance art show. Anarchists make zines and comix
and trade them with other anarchists, or sell them at
bookfairs for a nominal fee. Anarchists anthologize so
that the privilege of publication is de-hierarchized,
in books like Drunken Boat or Resist!. Anarchists
make gardens that grow food that will sustain us.
Anarchists write poetry and read it out loud to their
friends as bedtime stories or around the campfire, or
at black cat cafes and radical readings. Anarchists
write stories about struggles for political and
personal freedom. Anarchists produce journals like
Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, Arsenal: A
Magazine of Anarchist Strategy and Culture, Green
Anarchy, North-Eastern Anarchist, Insurrectionary
Anarchism, etc. There are literally thousands of
grass-roots anarchist writers artists poets comic
artists, including everyone from Seth Tobocman to
Jaggi Singh to Starhawk, and we are all, every single
one of us, active producers of culture. The cultural
objects we produce are theory and practice, as well as
being not-theory and not-practice. Anarchist thinking
must consider the important role of anarchist cultural
production.

Axiom ^. Anarchy is not a protest movement.
The anarchist movement today is in no way reducible to
the so-called anti-globalization movement, nor is that
the space from which it has emerged, nor does it seek
to be a central player in it. Anarchy is not about
confronting the centralized leadership of the World
Bank or the American government or the European Union,
although anarchists might choose to participate in
protests against these forms of oppression and
domination. But the anarchist movement, if we can even
concede that there is one, is not about protest.
Anarchists do not concede power to anyone, and are not
concerned with becoming involved in negotiating the
terms of our own oppression by being incorporated into
the decision-making processes of the International
Monetary Fund or the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
We do not want a seat at the table, that is not why we
protest, in fact, sometimes that is why we do not
protest. When anarchists do protest, we do not accept
the state directives on how to protest (ie. how to be
a good protester, by Bill Clinton), rather we protest
on our own terms. This is called direct action. It is
not a form of protest, it is a way of life. Watch the
Toronto Video Activist Collective's video, June 15th, and the Cascadia Collective's video, Breaking the
Spell: Eugene Anarchists and the WTO. Anarchist
theory must see beyond protest movements, and consider
the importance of direct action and its refusal of the
legal-illegal binary.

Axiom E. Anarchy is about events.
Reclaim the Streets is one important anti-spectacular
event that challenges everything about the way events
are supposed to be organized and take place. There is
no leadership, no unifying decision-making, no one
direction that the event goes, no one thing that it
does. It has no focus. RtS in London takes off in a
multitude of directions, has people dancing and eating
all over the place while the disoriented and
disempowered cops run in circles, and shuts down the
city for a huge street festival in which everyone
participates especially passers by. Anarchists make
things happen. They burn things down, they blow things
up, they shut things down, they build things, they
interact and participate. Temporary autonomous zones,
radical gatherings, anarchist book and freedom fairs,
anarchist soccer games, anarchist street parties.
These events are our lives, and they change our lives.
We become participants rather than consumers. We meet
fellow life participants with whom to share in these
events, with whom to share our lives. Read The Society
of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. Anarchist theory must
consider the importance of these kinds of events in
shaping anarchist culture, theory and practice.

Axiom whatever. Anarchy is not about violence or
non-violence.
The debates at various protest spokescouncils I've
attended centered on the issue of tactics which some
people wanted to classify as 'violent' or
'non-violent' in order to control the protest. In
Quebec City at the anti-FTAA protests in 2001, for
example, CLAC (the anti-capitalist convergence)
adopted the principle of "Diversity of Tactics" which
meant that everyone accepted that a diverse range of
protest tactics would be deployed -- in other words,
there was no group telling the protesters what they
could or couldn't do. Not the cops or the laws or the
fence, and certainly not the organizing collective or
the other affinity groups. In the media, protest is
variously characterized as violent vs. non-violent,
good protest vs. bad protest, etc. but these binaries
must fall because they are constructed by the type of
authoritarian thinking that anarchists reject
outright. Read Ann Hansen's book, Direct Action:
Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla, and The Wretched of the
Earth by Frantz Fanon. The question is not whether
property destruction is violent if it doesn't injure
another person, nor is it whether the cops are violent
(duh!), but whether the terms violence and its binary
opposite, non-violence, are useful at all when they
trap us between two poles and limit our options. Life
is not an either-or proposition. If post-structuralism
can be useful in anarchist theory, its usefulness
might be found in its critique of binaries like these.

Axiom Z. Anarchy is about sustainability.
While focused on living in the present moment,
anarchists also want to build sustainable communities,
collectives, gardens, relationships, housing, working
conditions, etc. We can see the world on the verge of
ecological collapse, and we reject the role of
anthropocentrism accepted by mainstream society that
says that's okay, or that is in denial of the
consequences of its own actions. Ecosystems,
bioregional diversity, permaculture, edible guerrilla
gardening, deep ecology, veganism, hunting and
gathering, organics, and other environmental and food
concerns are important within the anarchist debate on
sustainability, and inform the ways we choose to build
our lives. Green anarchists oppose genetically
modified organisms, cloning, and genetic manipulation
of any kind. Some green anarchists are luddites and
reject industrial society outright. Some green
anarchists believe that the labour movement has become
irrelevant because work should not be the focus of our
lives, and the current organization of work is
destroying the health of people and the planet. Read
Biopiracy by Vandana Shiva, Green Anarchy, Running on
Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization or anything
else by John Zerzan. The debate on sustainability and
how to achieve it must be taken into consideration by
any theory of anarchism.

Axiom undo. Anarchism is about unlearning.
Anarchist organizing, like all radical organizing, and
indeed all of society, is rife with internal
oppressions. We have internalized modes of domination,
which we unwittingly use in our daily interactions
with each other, from being raised in a racist,
capitalist, sexist, heterosexist, ableist, society
that teaches us how to exercize power over each other
in order to get what we want. We need to unlearn all
of this. We need to listen better to others, be more
open and inclusive, be more thoughtful when people
call us on our oppressive behaviours, and learn new
and better ways of being and interacting with others.
We can not accept that 'boys will be boys', 'it's a
dog eat dog world', 'survival of the fittest', or any
of the false so-called truisms that society has come
up with to explain away the inequalities in our day to
day life that translate into unacceptable behaviour
toward others. Toward our allies. Toward people we
care about. Internal oppression is what drives our
collectives apart and makes it difficult for us to
continue to work with others. Anarchist theory needs
to unlearn exclusionary ways of expressing ideas,
unlearn modes of domination where all the straight
white able-bodied guys get to speak and are
automatically respected, and instead listen to and
respect a range of perspectives coming from the wide
diversity of perspectives of anarchists who are
organizing today.

These axioms are not exhaustive, nor are they any kind
of directive. Rather they are just a few observations
about the multiplicities of anarchy in practice. I
don't believe that any one person can encompass all of
this organizing or theorizing work. Nor do I believe
that there can be a unifying theory (certainly not
post-structuralism) that will take all of these
debates, and the many more that are out there, into
consideration, in a sort of anarchist string theory of
everything. At the same time, none of the struggles or
ideas I have outlined occur independently of each
other; rather they are all inter-related nodes in a
rhizomatic network. Thus I believe that there should
be as many theorists as possible, working together or
separately; indeed that every person is a theorist of
anarchy, which they express as they put their ideas
and beliefs into transformative and transcendent
action. The more of us who write our ideas down, the
better. The debate must also continue in its oral
form, as happens at teach-ins, reading groups, radical
gatherings, etc.

With so many theorists, there should also be as many
anarchist theories as possible. The more the merrier,
as the capitalists say. Real anarchy. In fact, there
is probably only one thing we can all agree on -- that
there's a lot of work to be done. No, not even that
(see Axiom q above). Let's say instead that there is a
lot of play to be done. Anarchist theory, like
anarchist practice, at its roots, is about play. From
playing anarchist soccer to sex and gender play to
playing with words -- as play becomes another mode of
transcending authority -- as serious as these issues may
be, we are playing for our lives!

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APOC

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