Image Credit – mary rose lenore eng http://braingarbagedystopie.blogspot.com
There has been increasing interest in anarchism, with people around the globe writing and talking about it. A whole new generation is beginning to discover anarchists from the past like Emma Goldman and Alexeyevich Kropotkin and a new documentary is in the works. The word anarchy is swimming through twitter feeds and Facebook shares, coursing through avenues of the public mind. Ideas of mutual aid and voluntary association are becoming more and more relevant as the world stands in dire need of solutions to the current ballooning crisis of economic and political corruption.
Interestingly, the word is bandied about by governments with a very different meaning. On one side, the security apparatus of the US has generated a demonized version of ‘anarchist’ to promote fear within the general public by equating it with chaos and violence. ‘Black Bloc’, ‘terrorist’ and other loaded terms are associated with anarchism to engender fear and justify repression. Recently, the FBI raided Northwest activists and search warrants were used to find ‘anti-government or anarchist’ literature. Three young people were subpenaed and jailed for refusing to answer questions at a grand jury.
On the other side, the term anarchy is used to represent unmediated people power; non-violent, horizontally based social structures and direct action to awaken others to the working of the dominant system. It has come to mean defiant decentralization, where instead of confronting state power with a reaction to control, people are simply beginning to divest from the hierarchical oppressive systems and working together to build alternatives.
From the Arab Spring to Occupy, a new form of organizing is emerging. The recent uprisings around the world are marking a new era of social change. This trend stands out from movements of the past, as global solidarity and rapid mobilization through social networking reflects the inherently decentralized and stateless habitat of the Internet. Repressive regimes such as China and increasing surveillance and censorship in the Western world have tried to control the discourse. But, as long as the neutrality of the Internet is maintained, this explosion of online sharing of information knows no borders and as people rapidly adapt to free sharing of information, it is proving very difficult for governments and corporations to control.
Decentralized peer-to-peer organizing rejects centralized control maintained through the now decadent structures of representative democracy. Anthropologist David Graeber pointed to the anarchistic roots of Occupy,particularly its commitment to the leaderless, consensus-based decision-making practiced in the General Assembly of Occupy. For the last two years, the online network Anonymous also gained substantial media attention and modeled effective direct action with a leaderless culture and operations organized by spontaneous horizontal affinity groups.
It is noteworthy that all this has ushered in a new trend of activism never seen before. The global solidarity protests like the one against the Iraq War and the earlier resistance against the WTO and IMF were largely ignored by mainstream media and didn’t manage to sustain the connection or energy needed to actually change the system. In fact, after millions of people took to the streets, the wars went forward without a hiccup. Nothing really changed as a result of one time protests.
Occupy and the current uprisings are not like those conventional short-term actions. Encampment was a brilliant idea, as tents were used to root ideas of change into the system. Despite the eviction of Occupy and it appearing to lose its initial vitality, their tenacity revealed the effectiveness of their methods. Brutal police attacks on occupiers and Washington’s reaction by passing laws such as the NDAA are signs that the government is now becoming very afraid of the populace. What made this shift possible and brought the movement to mount a meaningfully challenge to the existing economic structure was the wholesale rejection of systems based on centralized entrenched authority.
We live in a globalized society where ‘consent of the governed’ is now manufactured through propaganda or denied by military force of authoritarian regimes. This use of coercive force has been largely hidden from a vast majority of people around the world. It is within this climate of public apathy and ignorance that WikiLeaks rose to prominence. At a rally for Julian Assange in Melbourne, Dan Mathews, one of the founding members of WikiLeaks remarked:
The people of this world are treated like mushrooms: Kept in the dark, and fed shit… WikiLeaks is an anti-mushroom organization and that we imagined WikiLeaks would be a force for the empowerment of the people of the world to use facts, to use understanding, to use science to build a better world.
In the article Building on WikiLeaks, Phillip Dorling brought out a little known fact; namely the key role that WikiLeaks supporters played in igniting the Occupy movement. He claims this was partly behind what became one of the largest social movements in the US. OWS did not only start from the Canadian Adbusters magazine or the online collective Anonymous, though he acknowledged the importance of their actions. He traced it even further back to 2010, when civil arousal emerged around the time of the Collateral Murder video release.
Despite the mainstream media’s disinformation against the organization, no one can deny how a new vocabulary of transparency and government secrecy has entered into everyday discourse. Along with it came the notion of ‘illegitimate governance’. The gestation of this concept is found in Assange’s early philosophy. In his early writing, Conspiracy as Governance, he articulated how “….. illegitimate governance is by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in ‘collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.”
At key places in history, the right term at the right time captures a rising sentiment in society and becomes a sign that guides the world in a certain direction. Illegitimate governance is one such term. It allowed people to question the given blind trust of government and authority and moreover to realize that their governments are not what they represent themselves to be.
The idea of primary western powers in the world being viewed as illegitimate at first seemed radical, but over time and with WikiLeaks continuous leaks and US government’s reactive but ineffectual response, for many people it is gradually becoming accepted as reality. Of course, leaked material was not the only thing that is causing public trust in the institutions to crumble. The slow motion implosion of the global monetary system with high employment and mortgage bubble crashes are helping fuel this public perception of illegitimacy. The perception that a government is illegitimate, when backed up with empirical, verifiable data is a critical punch to aid that process.
WikiLeaks source-driven journalism and radical transparency exposed the hidden actions of those who claim authority. This sense has even infiltrated the American population, which is generally insulated by corporate media from the wholesale fraud and other crimes of their governments. Trend Kays on Minnesota Daily spoke about how the revelations changed the American perspective of the world. Now, more American are becoming aware of the morally bankrupt reality of imperial power and the economic and social injustice happening in their name.
WikiLeaks was a trigger that opened a floodgate. What came forth was a civic outcry of resistance that has been percolating quietly underground beneath the veneer of apathetic corporatized politics. The world has seen the youth empowered by the radically decentralized medium of the Internet. In late 2010 John Perry Barlow, political activist and essayist tweeted: “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.”
When PayPal, Visa and MasterCard started their monopolistic financial blockade on WikiLeaks, Anonymous came forward to defend the freedom of speech that WikiLeaks stood for. An idea behind the mask formed a new kind of legion; “We are Anonymous. Expect us”. Ever since this defense of WikiLeaks, Anonymous has become a force to be reckoned with. What followed was the year of online hacktivists. Anonymous and LulzSec engaged in a non-violent cyber-action and helped explode the myth of imperial impunity.
In the Final episode of Assange’s “The World Tomorrow”, Tariq Ali and Noam Chomsky, both well-known activists of the intellectual left discussed how the West completely failed to anticipate the Arab Spring. Tariq Ali spoke of Arab empowerment:
We are witnessing that democracy is becoming more and more denuded of content. It’s like an empty shell, and this is what is angering young people, who feel “Whatever we do, whatever we vote for, nothing changes”, hence all these protests.
Courage is contagiously moving across the screens into the streets. The fire of self-immolation and global awakening, confirmed by US-Tunisian diplomatic cables spread like wildfire through social media and led to unprecedented uprisings in Egypt and around the world.
No one can deny the effect that WikiLeaks has had in the world. One small whistleblower website with no office or physical home became an incarnation entry point for a revolutionary challenge of imperial power. WikiLeaks showed what the power of digital horizontal mobilization can do.
In its mission statement, Wikileaks claimed that its goal is to open governments and achieve justice by means of transparency. From the outset, this phenomenon appeared to be guided by similar anarchistic principles that founded the Occupy movement, particularly in that a stateless entity with no allegiance to any country or corporate structure can reject the validity of outer authority on its face. This is found in the day-to-day operation of the organization. For example, WikiLeaks Twitter account, as of Oct 2012 has over 1,650,000 followers. That is influential without taking power from others and has come about with no corporate structure carrying it, purely through bottom up freely chosen affinity. It is a one of many coalescing points of decentralized power.
WikiLeaks is a prime example of what I term an anarchistic meritocracy. This social form stands in contrast to the corporate model of hierarchical and centralized distribution and communication. By creating and working with structures true to the inherently egalitarian platform of the Internet, anyone can help determine what individual or collective action is worthy of support. Merits are determined by peers, by each person’s input and sharing, rather than coming from above or filtered by an select group of people. The basic idea is that if something has merit, it is shared and amplified through enthusiasm and moral resonance.
The founder of the organization also held some vital anarchistic ideals.Assange’s philosophical roots in the Cypherpunk movement reveal subtle anarchistic principles. In a 2011 CBS News 60 minutes interview, Steve Kroft asked Assange if he was a subversive. Asssange said that WikiLeaks is subverting illegitimate authority and the real question should be whether the authority in question is truly legitimate.
In a 2012 Rolling Stone Interview, he expanded on this view of authority, noting that he is not against authority in itself:
Legitimate authority is important. All human systems require authority, but authority must be granted as a result of the informed consent of the governed. Presently, the consent, if there is any, is not informed, and therefore it’s not legitimate.
This nuanced attitude toward authority is shared by most anarchists, both past and present. Anarchism is not inherently against authority or government itself, but only authority that is illegitimate. Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, widely viewed as the father of anarchist theory said:
The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.
David Graeber clarified a misconception about anarchy and its resistance to acknowledging authority: “To be an anarchist is to be critical of authority and always examine it… to see if it is legitimate … you don’t worship authority as a thing in itself.”
Graeber also described how the consensus process is by default a basic rule of anarchy; “If you can’t force people to do things they don’t want to do, you’re starting with consensus one way or another.” The core idea behind this is that no one can govern others without the consent of the governed. This was also one of the formative passions at the heart of American Constitution.
Anarchism’s honoring of self-governance and the demand for consent of the governed was also acknowledged by Julian Assange. Citing Madison’s view on government Assange said:
… people determined to be in a democracy, to be their own government must have the power that knowledge will bring – because knowledge will always rule ignorance. You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else who is not ignorant, rule over you.
For Assange, the power of knowledge meant that public access to information is crucial for self-governance. The act of leaking and sharing vital information is a way to facilitate this process. Through exposing the secrecy of government and corporations, WikiLeaks reveals the true motivations of those in power who influence the will of the people. When this vital information is made available, the public can make conscious and intelligent decisions to give consent to government authority or not. Assange also said, “Leaking is inherently an anti-authoritarian act. It is inherently an anarchist act”. The act of leaking is an attempt to free the individual will enslaved to a system that exists without the consent of the governed.
In Wired Magazine’s Lamo chat logs, alleged whistleblower Manning characterized the possible release of the US diplomatic cables, saying:
Hilary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and finds an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format to the public… it’s open diplomacy… world-wide anarchy in CSV format… its Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth… its beautiful, and horrifying…
He might have seen what is to come. He continued:
and… its important that it gets out… i feel, for some bizarre reason it might actually change something… and god knows what happens now hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms … if not… than we’re doomed as a species.
Humanity is facing an unprecedented catastrophic crisis. With financial collapse, sub-prime mortgage and other monetary crimes, the political and economic worlds are showing signs of deep systemic failure. The assumed solid foundations of trusted institutions are slowly crumbling. In the vacuum after the fall of deeply diseased institutions, chaos, riots and violence might follow.
Anarchy is often thought of as chaos and this chaos is associated with destruction and as being antithetical to order. Yet as the Chinese proverb says, crisis is opportunity, so here is other side of chaos: its connection to creative potential.
A crisis of legitimacy leads to a new beginning and this is what we are seeing around the world with the Occupy movement and its progeny. By means of transparency, WikiLeaks made a crack in the veneer and revealed the current illegitimate state of many governments. It opened a way to imagine a way of governing ourselves.
As many leaders and institutions no longer trustworthy, are we now moving into a leaderless transition? What will emerge from the ashes after the collapse of plunder capitalism? What could occupy this newly opened possibility? Dissolving old forms does not have to be painful and horrific. It is actually a necessary process for creation. Chaos or creation? This is a choice. The global revolutionary force of anarchy is the power within each person to choose their own destiny. This power has just begun to wake up from a long slumber.
Note: A section of this paper is an excerpt from the article, “Insurgent Anarchism; An Idea Whose Time Has Come – Part III”.
I must take issue with the statement, “This nuanced attitude toward authority is shared by most anarchists, both past and present. Anarchism is not inherently against authority or government itself, but only authority that is illegitimate.”
Anarchy is most definitely “against authority or government itself”. Those who are willing to submit to an authority (consent of the governed) are completely different animals. While Julian Assange and OWS may bear some resemblance to anarchists/anarchy, at this moment in time, that is all it is. The co-opting and bending of the meaning of words is a treacherous path, and one we’ve witnessed in abundance in modern politics. It should be avoided at all costs. Check the meanings of Libertarianism, Constitutional Republic, et.al. for more accurate terms.
The examination here is from the point of view of the political left and therefore, not a complete picture. On the right, in recent times, are many groups such as the Tea Party (in its original form), many Ron Paul supporters (libertarians, more or less), members of the Free State Project in New Hampshire, and more that fit this description.
While I applaud the recognition of this possible new zeitgeist, I believe it to be of utmost importance to explore and define it accurately and objectively.
Thank you for taking time to read my post and giving me your perspective. I found what you said; “Anarchy is most definitely “against authority or government itself” very interesting because I feel you point to the generally prevalent misconception of anarchy. I think that to some degree, this portrayal of anarchists as those who oppose all forms of authority is what helped the establishment/ gov/hierarchical institutions simplify the complex thought of anarchism and use it to associate it with bomb throwing and rebellious violent acts like overthrowing the government. It has actually become another fake bogieman like the word ‘terrorist’.
Interestingly, before I explored anarchism, this notion of it as being against authority is exactly what came up to me when I heard the word. The more I dug into anarchism, I came to see a different picture. What emerged was a more nuanced complexity of belief and values behind the act of opposing self-ordained or hierarchical authority. Yes, from the surface, we can see historically they have been against many forms of state power and government and it is easy to form a conclusion that they are against all authority. But it is rather simplistic to claim anarchism is against all authority. While they have inherent opposition to hierarchy and dominance, I found how they do not oppose authority itself as some kind of ideology.
But we must also qualify the term authority. I found by exploring Assange’s take on authority and anarchist David Graeber’s perspective, that it is clear there is a difference between illegitimate and legitimate authority. Illegitimate authority leads to concentration of power, domination and hierarchy, while healthy and legitimate authority creates leaders that are balanced within their social environment. In many indigenous cultures, those people were identified as respected elders. Legitimate authority earned that status and they are there to serve a larger public, which really transforms what we know as authority in the current situation. David Graeber eloquently pointed out how anarchists do not worship authority as a thing in itself.
Check this clip. In it, Steven Johnson brings the idea of peer progressives. He describes how it does not fall into the right or left political spectrum. He describes how the right tends to wish the market to do miraculous things to solve problems, whereas the left generally wants government to regulate the market etc. Yet he indicates that we are in the new paradigm of the third,where peers are in charge, not corporations or the government. I now see how this new anarchism I have been pointing to in a sense falls in with this notion of peer progressives, as Steven lays it out.
I wanted to dismantle the dominant narrative and image about anarchism and open up a dialogue. I wanted to invite more people to take the word anarchism back from the US propaganda machine and reach its true meaning. If we ask, who are those that consider themselves anarchists? Are they violent people trying to overthrow the government? No! They are people who value collaboration and working together to create a society where each person can become an author (authority) of their own lives through practicing consensus and respecting each person’s will to govern themselves. It is already happening in places as was pointed out in the clip. Maybe some people are coming to realize that those who are portrayed as radicals are not so radical and that it is possible to find some real common values.
I think you/Hayes need to study the origin of the term meritocracy – it came from a 1984 style piece of satire – its like the American ruling elite – people can get there on ‘merit’ but then can only maintain position by reinforcing elite culture – sort of a dictatorship of the capable/fortunate – the fact that it has become a legitimised term for some to describe the US says a great deal. Your use of the term skews the original meaning and to me seems to unconsciously reveal something about the politics and internal hierarchy of wikileaks. This organisation is not democratic or transparent – given our current circumstances I have no problem with this particularly in light of whats been achieved but we shouldn’t conjure up some notion of anarchistic meritocracy to try to reconcile the contradiction. The two terms are an anathema to each other and irreconcilable. In the direct democracy model of Occupy does the merit of proposals attaining hierarchy over others suggest meritocracy – no that would be a misapprehension of the term – organisations like wikileaks are the revolutionaries helping us on our way while utilising traditional internal decision making structures – helping to open up the future for the possibility of what Occupy represents.
I am aware of the original use of the word meritocracy. I sourced another recent use of this versatile term. This is how I came up with the term ‘anarchistic meritocracy’ I used in this article:
http://whistle.is/?p=511
Chris Hayes wrote a book called “Twightlight of the elites, where he pointed to the original use of the word as satire. He clearly understood the intent of that first use. He then put it in the modern context. I went on to transform it in a different article to describe something different than a fig leaf for illegitimate power. Here is an excerpt from another article that I wrote:
“Christopher Hayes, editor of Nation magazine, (2012) described how the American social model of a meritocracy — the idea that those that work hard and improve their lot can build their own prosperity, is inherent in the political fable of the US. Hayes talked about how this notion of the meritocracy itself has seeds for destruction, in a tendency toward oligarchy. Acquisition of wealth in the Wall Street culture and one-dimensional methods of measuring intelligence for higher education has defined merits and maintains this system …. ”
The idea of anarchistic meritocracy that I am putting forth is related to the inherent nature of the Internet and WikiLeaks as one of many organizations that were built upon that infrastructure. I was not talking about internal organization style, leadership and potential hierarchy etc. Yes, it may feel contradictory when we think of the original meaning of the word, meritocracy, but how I was using it with the term ‘anarchistic meritocracy’ is a transformation of the term. I am calling out the use of the term ‘representative democracy’, which is not what it says it is. I now am putting forward a different kind of democracy, which is more direct and participatory. Here is how I explained anarchistic meritocracy in the other article, if you are interested:
“Now, with the advent of the Internet, a huge shift has occurred, which is at least as pivotal as the invention of the printing press. The move from centralized mass media to interactive digital sharing of information has opened up a whole new world of possibility. In this digital age, with unlimited and almost zero-cost of copying, everyone can create content and share it. Distribution is carried through crowd-sourcing based on grassroots peer-to-peer resonance and affinity, in the form of the viral meme, re-tweets and file sharing. In the old forms of printing, the flow of information is controlled from top down. Production and distribution is at the mercy of vested corporate interests and a few ‘experts’ in the editorial room. Yet, with the egalitarian nature of the Internet, distribution naturally began to flow more freely. Mikhail Bakunin, Russian revolutionary and philosopher described anarchism as the “absolute right to self-determination, to associate or not to associate, to ally themselves with whomever they wish”.
People freely choose who to connect with and who not to and here the power of free association ensured by the First Amendment is truly exercised. What is emerging now are networks of anarchic meritocracy in which the everyday person creates equal opportunity to express themselves and determine what is worthy of their own newly discovered power of distribution.
In this spawning network, merits are determined by peers, by each person’s resonance and passion, instead of through appointed experts and credentialed elites. If something has merit, it is shared and may even go viral. This is a network emerging out of unfiltered and unmediated connection that actively engages individuals with each other in common interest or need”.
The last paragraph of your reply is encouraging to all. I hope the age of the individual is here too. Thanks for that
I agree the words anarchy and anarchist (anarchism, etc) have been misused, but it’s precisely because of the misuse that an effort should be made to restore their fundamental meaning. If people who reject all forms of government, “anarchists,” are not known by that term, then what term do we call them? If a philosophy exists that entirely rejects government, “anarchy,” what else should it be called? These *are* the words that describe them.
It’s my guess that if these fundamental meanings are not applied consistently then other terms will emerge to take their places. For the original meaning of “liberalism” one now uses “classical liberalism.” To one day speak of anarchy one may well need to call it “classical anarchy.”
There are differing ideas of “authority,” and some do not require a state or government to exist, for example: Anarcho-Capitalists, who accept the ‘authority’ of a free market among free people, and who also accept the ideas of individual property rights (self ownership) and non-aggression as ultimate authority opposed to any coercive contract with a government or other human authority.
A voluntary, peer to peer model in the computer world may take different forms. There is a term, “benign dictator,” that describes a project’s author/leader that retains ultimate authority but listens to, is influenced by and responds (usually) positively, to the input from the project’s volunteer and/or paid staff. (Wikileaks may resemble the model).
Another is Debian, a GNU/Linux distribution of mostly FOSS (Free Open-Source Software) is governed by a constitution and democratic vote. It relies on volunteers and donations.
In the video, the first two hypothetical models resemble the above and they are fundamentally different from the third model he describes. The first two resemble the software world described above. There is no coercion involved in the operations. Everyone is a volunteer. The third model he describes, the city in Brazil, in contrast, relies on force and coercion to operate. Individuals must pay taxes to the government. @ 2:07 in the video, the statement is made, “money comes from the state.” Money does not come from the state. This is a fundamental flaw in the flow.
Just some of my thoughts.