anarchy of everyday life

An Anarchy of Everyday Life (2012) by jeff shantz.. via 17 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jeff-shantz-an-anarchy-of-everyday-life]

notes/quotes:

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Contemporary anarchism offers a mid-range movement organized somewhere between the levels of everyday life, to which it is closest, and insurrection. Rooted in the former they seek to move towards the latter. Anarchists look to the aspects of people’s daily lives that both suggest life without rule by external authorities and which might provide a foundation for anarchist social relations more broadly. This commitment forms a strong and persistent current within diverse anarchist theories. This perspective expresses what might be called a constructive anarchy or an anarchy of everyday life, at once conserving and revolutionary.

to me.. then not legit diff/revolutionary

Colin Ward suggests that anarchism, “far from being a speculative vision of a future society…is a description of a mode of human organization, *rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society” (Ward, 1973: 11). As Graeber (2004) suggests, the examples of viable anarchism are almost endless. These could include almost any form of organization, **from a volunteer fire brigade to the postal service, as long as it is not hierarchically imposed by some external authority (Graeber, 2004).

*to me.. not till we get out of sea world.. hari rat park law et al

**to me.. ie’s are imposed.. any form of m\a\p as imposition ness

Even more, as many recent anarchist writings suggest, the potential for resistance might be found anywhere in everyday life. If power is exercised everywhere, it might give rise to resistance everywhere. Present-day anarchists like to suggest that a glance across the landscape of contemporary society reveals many groupings which are anarchist in practice if not in ideology.

cancerous distraction

Examples include the leaderless small groups developed by radical feminists, coops, clinics, learning networks, media collectives, direct action organizations; the spontaneous groupings that occur in response to disasters, strikes, revolutions and emergencies; community-controlled day-care centers; neighborhood groups; tenant and workplace organizing; and so on (Ehrlich, Ehrlich, DeLeon and Morris 18).

cancerous distractions.. graeber violence in care law .. steiner care to oppression law.. et al

While these are obviously not strictly anarchist groups, they often operate to *provide examples of mutual aid and non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian modes of living which carry the memory of anarchy within them. Often the practices are essential for people’s day-to-day survival under the crisis states of capitalism. Ward notes that “the only thing that makes life possible for millions in the United States are its non-capitalist elements….Huge areas of life in the United States, and everywhere else, are built around **voluntary and mutual aid organisations” (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 105).

*to me.. we have none to date

**to me.. cancerous distractions

Kropotkin (1972: 132) notes that the state, the formalized rule of dominant minorities over subordinate majorities, is “but one of the forms of social life.” For anarchists, people are quite capable of developing forms of order to meet specific needs and desires. As Ward (1973: 28) suggests, “given a common need, a collection of people will…by improvisation and experiment, evolve order out of the situation — this order being more durable and more closely related to their needs than any kind of order external authority could provide.”

pëtr kropotkin.. colin ward

Order, thus arrived at, is also preferable for anarchists since it is not ossified and extended, often by force, to situations and contexts different than those from which it emerged, and for which it may not be suited. This order, on the contrary is flexible and evolving, where necessary giving way to other agreements and forms of order depending on peoples’ needs and the circumstances confronting them.

Living examples of the anarchist perspectives on order emerging “spontaneously” out of social circumstances are perhaps most readily or regularly observed under conditions of immediate need or emergency as in times of natural disaster and/or economic crisis, during periods of revolutionary upheaval or during mass events such as festivals. Anarchists try to extend mutual aid relations until they make up the bulk of social life. Constructive anarchy is about developing ways in which people enable themselves to take control of their lives and participate meaningfully in the decision-making processes that affect them, whether education, housing, work or food.

all cancerous distractions.. but esp this sentence.. oi

we need a nother way.. a deeper way

there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it

legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p

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Anarchists note that changes in the structure of work, notably so-called lean production, flexibalization and the institutionalization of precarious labour, have stolen people’s time away from the family along with the time that might otherwise be devoted to activities in the community (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 107). In response people must find ways to escape the capitalist law of value, to pursue their own values rather than to produce value for capital. This is the real significance of anarchist do-it-ourselves activity and the reason that I would suggest such activities have radical, if overlooked, implications for anti-capitalist struggles.

For Paul Goodman, an American anarchist whose writings influenced the 1960s New Left and counterculture, anarchist futures-present serve as necessary acts of “drawing the line” against the authoritarian and oppressive forces in society. Anarchism, in Goodman’s view, was never oriented only towards some glorious future; it involved also the preservation of past freedoms and previous libertarian traditions of social interaction. “A free society cannot be the substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life” (Marshall, 1993: 598). Utopian thinking will always be important, Goodman argued, in order to open the imagination to new social possibilities, but the contemporary anarchist would also need to be a conservator of society’s benevolent tendencies.

paul goodman.. perhaps until now.. now we have means for legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake

Primitive accumulation: Capital against mutual aid

Capitalist society consists largely of “the accumulation of life as work,” to use Cleaver’s (1992: 116) apt description. Valorization speaks to the processes by which capital can manage to put people to work, and to do so in such a way that the process is repeated on an ever increasing scale (Cleaver, 1992a). The structure of the wage, the division of labour and surplus value are all mechanisms through which exploitation is organized (Cleaver, 1992a). Notably, the circuit of valorization involves circulation (exchange) as well as production.

any form of m\a\p exploits us.. makes/perpetuates us being not us

Valorization expresses the fact that, from the perspective of capital, the specific character of each productive activity is unimportant, so long as that activity produces something that can, through its sale, realize enough surplus to allow the process to start all over again (Cleaver, 1992a). The enormously diverse range of human activities, mental or physical, that people are capable of are rendered the same in the eyes of capital. What is important is that they can be put in the service of (exchange) value creation (for capital). More recently theorists, including Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, have discussed the way in which contemporary capital makes use of “immaterial labour,” especially emotional or psychological capacities that allow people to care for each other, a point that echoes historic anarchist concerns.

antonio negri and michael hardt

If valorization represents the subordination of people’s productive activities to capitalist command, Cleaver (1992a: 120) suggests that disvalorisation expresses people’s loss of those abilities taken up by capital. This effects a broader impoverishment of social life as the specific qualities of a diversity of skills and abilities are replaced by a narrower range of commercialized, mechanized skills (Cleaver, 1992a).

5

A central, and ongoing, process in the history of capitalism is “the replacement of the self-production of use-values by the consumption of commodities” (Cleaver, 1992a: 119). This is in large part what a whole series of practices, from the enclosures through colonialism more broadly, have been geared towards. This separation of people from the capacities for *self-production of use-values has entailed the various forms of violence that Marx has called primitive accumulation. An ongoing process, primitive accumulation involves the actual, often bloody, practices by which capitalism takes over and commercializes growing areas of human life. This has included the clearing of peasants from common lands, the destruction of artisanal workshops, the canceling of local rights to the land and the destruction of entire homes and villages. As Cleaver (1992a: 119) notes, a central aspect of primitive accumulation has been “the displacement of domestic food and handicraft production by capitalist commodities.” Nowhere has the creation of the “home market” been established without such displacements.

*cancerous distraction

But of this we gain little insight from Marx. In his city-boy ignorance of rural life and perhaps in a desire to avoid any backward-looking sentimentalism, Marx seems to have spent little time or energy during his studies of primitive accumulation in England and in the colonies trying to understand what positive values might have been lost. Unlike many of his generation who did worry about the nature of those social ties and communal values which were rapidly disappearing, Marx kept his attention fixed firmly toward the future (Cleaver, 1992a: 122).

Interestingly, the response to primitive accumulation, and its effects, has been one of the key points distinguishing Marxists from anarchists historically. Anarchists have taken a vastly different, and less sanguine, approach to primitive accumulation from that taken by many Marxists, and certainly from the approach taken by Marx. Speaking about Marx, Cleaver (1992a: 121) notes:

karl marx

When we examine his writings on primitive accumulation and colonialism — from the Communist Manifesto to Capital — we often find little or no empathy for the cultures being destroyed/subsumed by capital. He certainly recognised such destruction/subsumption but frequently saw its effects on feudalism and other pre-capitalist forms of society as historically progressive. For Marx, workers were being liberated from pre-capitalist forms of exploitation (they ‘escaped from the regime of the guilds’) and peasants from ‘serfdom’ and ‘the idiocy of rural life.’

Such an uncaring approach found its most widespread and influential expression within Marxism under the Second International view that societies could not be revolutionary until they had entered the capitalist stage. This perspective was used among other things to argue against the possibility of revolution in Russia since it was a feudal rather than capitalist society.

Anarchists have been deeply concerned about exactly the values that have been lost. For anarchists these lost abilities and skills extend beyond tasks of labour to include *important elements of social life such as decision-making or social interaction. Cleaver discusses this loss, and related centralization and professionalization, in terms that are reminiscent of the historic anarchist analysis as discussed below: **“The rise of professional medicine, for example, not only produced a widespread loss of abilities to heal, but it also involved the substitution of one particular paradigm of healing for a much larger number of approaches to ‘health’, and thus an absolute social loss — the virtual disappearance of a multiplicity of alternative ‘values’” (1992a: 120). It is the attempt to identify, to understand and to recover the values that have been lost, overlooked or subsumed under capitalism that has inspired major anarchist projects whether Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, the works of Elisee Reclus or, more recently, Graeber’s False Coin.

*cancerous distractions

**forbidden cures et al.. bush health law

mutual aid.. false coin

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Related to these processes is the degrading of skills experienced by many workers and the monopolization of skilled labour by higher paid “mental workers” such as engineers. Opposing, and to some extent reversing, this replacement is a crucial, perhaps the key, aspect of anarchist activity today. It is this opposition that underlies anarchist criticisms of the monopolization of learning skills by professional instructors or the monopolization of care-giving skills by professional social workers.

any form of m\a\p.. ie: production ness et al

Constructive anarchy: Communism as mutual aid

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This situation has been addressed by the anarchist Paul Goodman in rather poignant terms: “The pathos of oppressed people, however, is that, if they break free, they don’t know what to do. Not having been autonomous, they don’t know what it’s like, and before they learn, they have new managers who are not in a hurry to abdicate” (Goodman quoted in Ward, 2004: 69). That means that people have to construct approximations in which the social relations of a future society can be learned, experienced and nurtured.

perhaps prior to now.. now we have means for legit global detox leap

our approx today:

This is part of the impetus behind the creation of “free schools,” “infoshops,” industrial unions and squats. These are places in which the life of the free commune, buried beneath the debris of authoritarian systems, can be glimpsed again, if only in a limited form.

again.. perhaps prior to now.. we can do so much better/deeper than free schools, infoshops.. union ness.. infinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness

imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)

ie: need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs

8

Anarchism envisions a flexible, pluralist society where *all the needs of mankind would be supplied by an infinite variety of voluntary associations. The world is honeycombed with affinity groups from chess clubs to anarchist propaganda groups. They are formed, dissolved and reconstituted according to the fluctuating whims and fancies of the individual adherents. It is precisely because they “reflect individual preferences” that such groups are the lifeblood of the free society (1979: 8).

yes that.. and for that.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. so we can..

*org around legit needs

legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p

In his discussion of the US labor movement, “The American Labor Movement: A New Beginning”(ALM), Dolgoff reminds readers that the labor movement once put a great deal of energy into building more permanent forms of alternative institutions. An expanding variety of mutual aid functions were provided through unions in the early days of labor.

They created a network of cooperative institutions of all kinds: schools, summer camps for children and adults, homes for the aged, health and cultural centers, insurance plans, technical education, housing, credit associations, et cetera. All these, and many other essential services were provided by the people themselves, long before the government monopolized social services wasting untold billions on a top-heavy bureaucratic parasitical apparatus; long before the labor movement was corrupted by “business unionism” (1980: 31).

yeah.. those be cancerous distractions.. graeber violence in care law et al

Lineages of constructive anarchy: Kropotkin and mutual aid

Among the primary historical influences on everyday anarchy, perhaps the most significant is Kropotkin’s version of anarcho-communism and, especially, his ideas about mutual aid. In Mutual Aid Kropotkin documents the centrality of co-operation within animal and human groups and links anarchist theory with everyday experience. Kropotkin’s definition suggests that anarchism, in part, “would represent an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees…temporary or more or less permanent…for all possible purposes” (quoted in Ward and Goodway, 2003: 94).

if like imagine if we ness.. aka: sans any form of m\a\p

9

In several book-length research works, including Mutual Aid, The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, Kropotkin tried to sketch the manifestation and development of mutual aid historically. What his research suggested to him was that mutual aid was always present in human societies, even if its development was never uniform or the same over different periods or within different societies. At various points mutual aid was the primary factor of social life while at other times it was submerged beneath forces of competition, conflict and violence. The key, however was that, regardless of its form, or the adversity of circumstances in which it operated, it was always there “providing the foundation for recurrent efforts at co-operative self-emancipation from various forms of domination (the state, institutional religion, capitalism)” (Cleaver, 1992b: 3).

to me.. mutual aid as described in conquest of bread and fields factories and workshops.. not free enough.. so still in whales (vs legit free people) sea world.. talking/perpetuating whalespeak

10

On the one side were the institutions and behaviors of mutual struggle such as narrow-minded individualism, competition, the concentration of landed and industrial property, capitalist exploitation, the state and war. On the other side were those of mutual aid such as cooperation in production, village folkmotes, communal celebrations, trade unionism and syndicalism, strikes, political and social associations (Cleaver, 1992b: 4).

oi.. cancerous distractions.. and why we have not yet gotten to legit free people.. (can’t seem to let go enough to see)

Where the economists (and later the sociologists of work) celebrated the efficacy and productivity of specialization in production, Kropotkin showed how that very productivity was based not on competition but on the interlinked efforts of only formally divided workers (Cleaver, 1992b: 5).

if still focused on production ness.. not legit free.. black science of people/whales law et al

Anarchist sociologists might do well to remember Kropotkin’s advice concerning the methods to be followed by anarchist researchers. In his 1887 book, Anarchist Communism, Kropotkin suggests that the anarchist approach differs from that of the utopian: “[The anarchist] studies human society as it is now and was in the past…tries to discover its tendencies, past and present, its growing needs, intellectual and economic, and in his [sic] ideal he merely points out in which direction evolution goes” (quoted in Cleaver, 1992b: 3).

history ness is killing us

11

Marx’s writings offered much less detail than Kropotkin’s works when it comes to the issue of working class subjectivity in contrast to the rather extensive analysis Marx provided with regard to capitalist domination. It was only through the decades of work carried out by various autonomist Marxists that there was developed any Marxist analysis of working class autonomy that came close to a parallel of Kropotkin’s work (Cleaver, 1992b: 7).

Constructive anarchy in action: Colin Ward’s sociological anarchism

Perhaps the broadest and most sustained vision of constructive anarchy comes from Colin Ward. Ward is best known through his third book Anarchy in Action (1973) which was, until his 2004 contribution to the Oxford Press “Short Introduction” series, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction, his only book explicitly about anarchist theory. Longtime anarchist George Woodcock identified Anarchy in Action as one of the most important theoretical works on anarchism and I would have to agree. It is in the pages of that relatively short work that Ward makes explicit his highly distinctive version of anarchism, what I term ‘an anarchy of everyday life.’

reading anarchy in action now as well

Ward follows Kropotkin in identifying himself as an anarchist communist and has even suggested that Anarchy in Action is merely an extended contemporary footnote to Mutual Aid (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 14). Still, Ward goes beyond Kropotkin in the importance he places on co-operative groups in anarchist social transformation.

*Ward is critical of anarchists’ preoccupation with anarchist history and in his own works prefers to emphasize the here-and-now and the immediate future (Ward and Goodway, 2003). Ward describes his approach to anarchism as one that is based on actual experiences or practical examples rather than theories or hypotheses. Through the responses of readers to articles published in Anarchy Ward found that for many people anarchy aptly described the “organized chaos” that **people experienced during their daily lives, even at their workplaces. Incredibly, this perspective on anarchism was so outside of the parameters of mainstream anarchism that in 1940, when Ward tried to convince his Freedom Press Group colleagues to print a pamphlet on the squatters’ movement “it wasn’t thought that this is somehow relevant to anarchism” (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 15).

*yes.. if only.. if only we could legit let go of history ness.. and

**if get out of sea world.. ie: workplaces?.. hari rat park law et al

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As Ward (2003: 48) notes because anarchists traditionally “have conceived of the whole of social organisation as a series of interlocking networks of autonomous groups.” Thus it is important that anarchists pay serious attention to the lessons to be learned from successful ones.

oi oi oi .. same song as long as still in sea world

Autonomous groups that he has studied or participated in are characterized by “having a secure internal network based on friendship and shared skills, and a series of external networks of contacts in a variety of fields” (Ward, 2003: 44). Among these groups Ward includes the Freedom Press Group, A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School of alternative education, Burgess Hill School and South London’s Peckham Health Centre which offered approaches to social medicine. Autonomous groups are distinguished from other forms of organization characterized by “hierarchies of relationships, fixed divisions of labour, and explicit rules and practices” (Ward, 2003: 48). Autonomous groups are marked by a high degree of individual autonomy within the group, reliance on direct reciprocities in decision-making, for decisions affecting all group members, and the temporary and fluctuating character of leadership.

oi oi oi oi decision making is unmooring us law et al

When people have no control over, or responsibility for, crucial decisions over important aspects of life, *whether regarding housing, education or work, these areas of social life become obstacles to personal fulfillment and collective development. Yet when people are free to make major decisions and contribute to the planning and implementation of decisions involving key areas of daily life there are improvements in individual and social well-being (Ward and Goodway, 2003: 76). Ward finds resonance in the findings of industrial psychologists who suggest that satisfaction in work is very strongly related to the “span of autonomy,” or the proportion of work time in which workers are free to make and act on their own decisions.

*oi oi .. cancerous distractions

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Theoretical affinities: Rethinking communism

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The attempt to reconceptualize the process of moving beyond capitalism, as developed in the works of autonomist Marxists, bears quite striking similarities to the approach offered by Kropotkin regarding this question (Cleaver, 1992b). Autonomist Marxists share with most anarchists a rejection of concepts of “the transitional period” or “the transitional program.” In place of “the transition” autonomists and anarchists emphasize some version of what Hakim Bey calls “immediatism,” or activities that suggest the revolution is already underway.

need: legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake

Conclusion

Anarchists argue that for most of human history people have organized themselves collectively to satisfy their own needs.

problem is .. we have no idea what our legit needs are.. we need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs

Anarchists sometimes point to post offices and railway networks as examples of the way in which local groups and associations can combine to provide complex networks of functions without any central authority (Ward, 2004). Postal services work as a result of voluntary agreements between different post offices, in different countries, without any central world postal authority (Ward, 2004). As Ward suggests: “Coordination requires neither uniformity nor bureaucracy” (2004: 89).

there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it

legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p

16

The moment we stop insisting on viewing all forms of action only by their function in reproducing larger, total, forms of inequality of power, we will also be able to see that anarchist social relations and non-alienated forms of action are all around us. And this is critical because it already shows that anarchism is, already, and has always been, one of the main bases for human interaction. We self-organize and engage in mutual aid all the time. We always have (Graeber, 2004:76).

but the wack a mole ness of part\ial ness is keeping us from legit self org.. since forever..

The anarchist future present must, almost by definition, be based upon ongoing experiments in social arrangements, in attempting to address the usual dilemma of maintaining both individual freedoms and social equality (Ehrlich, 1996b). The revolution is always in the making. These projects make up what the anarchist sociologist Howard Ehrlich calls “anarchist transfer cultures.”

ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)

As Goodman notes: “The pathos of oppressed people, however, is that, if they break free, they don’t know what to do. Not having been autonomous, they don’t know what it’s like, and before they learn, they have new managers who are not in a hurry to abdicate” (Goodman quoted in Ward, 2004: 69). Taking a more nuanced approach to revolutionary transformation one can understand constructive anarchy as concerned with the practical development of revolutionary transfer cultures. Anarchist organizing is built on what Ward calls “social and collective ventures rapidly growing into deeply rooted organizations for welfare and conviviality” (2004: 63). Colin Ward refers to these manifestations of everyday anarchy as “quiet revolutions.”

we need a legit and quiet enough.. quiet revolution

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