Written by Blade Runner– first published by Plan C, an anti-authoritarian communist organisation based in UK

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The year began with fresh bloodshed in Iran and Syria, adding to the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza. The Middle East, as Abdullah Öcalan—ideological leader of the Kurdish movement in northeastern Syria—has argued, is the cradle of nation-state civilisation. From the Sumerian ziggurat to today’s capitalist modernity, the region has long seen patriarchal, hierarchical structures emerge, deeply embedded in state power. The Kurds, who have experienced genocide in their history, state-less, now face another looming threat in Rojava, where Turkish-backed jihadist militias operate with impunity. In Iran, a youth- and middle-class-led uprising is being brutally crushed by the Islamist regime, with Kurdish-majority areas paying the highest price in blood.

These developments expose a broader split in the Western left: some emphasise grassroots liberation struggles from below, while others focus on geopolitics and great-power alignments. Still, both camps acknowledge the surge in militarisation—rooted in the agendas of white men in power, securing their castles as the world burns.

Trump’s version of fascism, built on brute-force governance, gave new expression to an old white supremacist worldview: domination as virtue, state violence as default. In the US, vulnerable communities are under attack both in law and daily life, while federal institutions are being hollowed out and reshaped by far-right actors exploiting the left’s strategic collapse. As capitalism slams into ecological and resource limits, elites double down—playing the fascist cardas their system fractures alongside the ecosystem.

Much of the Western left remains trapped in a framework inherited from the postwar compromise—where revolutionary potential was traded for social peace and welfare became the terrain of struggle. This strategic vacuum continues today. 

How did we get here? 

Capital’s restructuring since the 80s through digitalisation and financialisation detached life from collective decision-making. Based on a drastic technical shift, the neoliberal political design enforced the merger of state and capital into a hierarchy-preserving machine, that protects the pyramidic structure of economy and power while producing dependence to it.

The neoliberal assault to the working class under the ‘less state’ marquise staged a spectacle on which the unions negotiate in the midst of a raging social war waged on the lowest classes. There is a deeper continuity here that remains protected—the very architecture of the welfare state is tied to capital accumulation and state sovereignty. Reforms, however welcome, cannot do much to erode its core functions for discipline, control and population management.

Welfare, even at its heights, never enabled autonomy. Today, we find ourselves defending scraps—yet unable to replace the model with bottom-up infrastructures not based on extraction or obedience.

A great shift towards consumerist abundance has taken place: smart phones, branded clothing, laptops, vehicles, traveling, are now accessible to wider strata than ever before. Or at least this is the promise that has been built upon decades of urban gentrification and the expansion of the services economy. Middle classes are deeply invested in this materialistic social contract, so much that leisure time is willingly being replaced with commercial entrepreneurship. For many activists of the white middle class, the boundaries between “the struggle” or “the action” and a paid relationship with charities or NGOs is becoming increasingly blur.

This new reality has been conditioned as ‘freedom,’ to justify the installation of the core-zone insulation through militarised borders and technocratic management. Welfare state and the promise of consumerist abundance is not a function of solidarity anymore—it is a cushioned internal border, mirroring its reverse spiky version from the outside.

In this context, the mainstream narrative frames the uprisings of the 2010s as relics or cautionary tales. But the uprisings led by Gen Z across Asia, Africa, and Latin America is a reality check: mass militant street action not only remains possible—it continues to erupt as the clearest threat to regimes when electoral politics stall. This signals a shift from demands for inclusion and integration, to anti-hierarchial participation, to construction of new autonomous spaces. Forms of resistance not aimed at improving state functions, but bypassing or replacing them.

Genocide at the bordersⁱ

The fractures in today’s Western left echo the deeper planetary divide. The neoliberal information age sharpened the separation between the fortified Western citadel and the militarised periphery. In the global South, war is a reality for many, and its toll is most brutally felt by women—those raped, enslaved, executed by jihadists and warlords. Patriarchal terror that feels like time travel to the Dark Ages thrives under structures propped up by the liberal West.

That terror arrives at the beaches of Fortress Europe. Tens of thousands of immigrants die every year attempting to reach safety, mostly at sea. Over 10,000 people died in transit to Spain in 2024 alone. The real number is likely far higher, since undocumented movement is difficult to trace. In 2023, the Greek Coast Guard allowed more than 600 people drown in a single shipwreck—a direct result of the informal pushback policy. Deadly incidents as a result brutal push-back operations are reported every year. Frontex—Europe’s ICE—has become the EU’s most heavily funded agency, with its own ships, aircraft, drones, and weapons. Its 10,000-strong Standing Corps is the first and only pan-European armed force, operating with a budget that rivals those of small countries.

But border violence is only one face of the system’s breakdown. Behind it lies a deeper contradiction: capitalism has always emerged from a largely peasant and rural society. The agrarian question remains structurally unresolved: how can capital dismantle, discipline, or absorb peasant production while preventing rural populations rendered surplus from becoming a source of instability? What happens to land, labour, food systems, and social relations when profit demands endless expansion in a world of finite resources?

As ecosystems collapse and agriculture fails, more and more people are forced into motion—some fleeing drought and desertification, others pushed by floods, fires, or rising seas. Climate displacement is here and will become increasingly a major factor in global migration. The uneven impact of eco-collapse mirrors and reinforces the divide between the fortified Western citadel and the militarised, expendable periphery. It is overwhelmingly the poorest who are forced to move, while the wealthiest retreat behind borders, flood walls, and drone-enforced no-go zones.

In a way, rivers of people returning to the source close an infinite loop, further sharpening the divide between resurgent nationalism and emancipatory politics. And there is no ‘new world’ left to colonise with Europe’s so-called ‘dangerous classes’—its surplus poor, displaced, and radicalised. Increasingly, capitalism’s only remaining ‘solution’ appears to be mass death. The systematic slaughtering of migrants on Europe’s shores is not a malfunction but a structural expression of a dead end. 

The farmers in Europe have felt that dead end too, that they are among those slated for sacrifice. Greece, among other countries like France, Spain, Portugal and Belgium, saw one of the largest agricultural uprisings in years as farmers face soaring fuel costs, livestock disease, and decades of rural neglect. Their demands go beyond subsidies, asking for the reversal of the whole neoliberal EU agricultural design. The repression has been severe and has been met with widespread solidarity from workers, students, anarchists, and local communities. The agricultural sector is another frontline in the wider collapse of extractive economies under the state/capitalist-created climate stress.

Genocides are becoming a permanent tendency in a system that, having exploited the planet to its limits, now turns inward, consuming its own surplus population in a futile attempt to stay alive. Neocolonialism delayed this reckoning by exporting social conflict and looting the periphery to build welfare at the core. This pacified the working classes of the West. But immigration undoes this arrangement, reverses the flow, and brings the contradictions home.

Fascism has returned out of necessity—from the ruling class’s need to retain control when the old arrangement no longer works. Social democracy is entirely unfit for the current moment, stuck in domestic redistribution politics while the global system itself rots. Electoral results across Europe confirm this irrelevance.

What was always a fragile compromise is now in terminal decline. The migrant genocide is not just a consequence—it’s an expression of this slow breakdown. Western foreign policy increasingly centres on keeping immigration contained at the source. Governments can’t resolve the global agrarian question. And so border violence, genocide, and militarisation all flow from the same unresolved root.

The system is now operating at boiling point. Rising mass radicalisation at home has led to escalated repression. Dissent is criminalised, disruptive direct action is proscribed as domestic terrorism, and zero tolerance becomes doctrine.

Militarisation, then, becomes the new organising logic. The Cold War’s ideological veneer has melted. What remains is open competition, brute force, and intensified suppression of disagreement. The logic that obliterates Gaza and threatens the Kurds in Rojava, is the same logic that drowns migrants in the Mediterranean, assassinates them and their supporters in the US, demonises migrants in Britain, criminalises dissent, and elevates white supremacist narratives.

What can we do?

All state actors—despite tactical differences—ultimately reinforce the same oppressive capitalist modernity. They align in their efforts to crush any alternatives. Our task, as the libertarian anti-authoritarian communist tendency, is to expose this machinery and stand with those at the front lines of resistance—from London to Minneapolis, from Iran to Sri Lanka, from Gaza to Peru, and beyond.

The US may soon lose its role as the lead architect of the world system—and it will not fall quietly. For us, this may also be an opportunity. Our role is to articulate and express a libertarian communist perspective: the destruction of the state and the creation of horizontal cooperation among communities from below. Taking action means embracing a diversity of tactics, supporting those targeted by state surveillance and carceral violence, and building bonds of trust with communities under attack. We must carve out spaces of refusal where strategy can be shared and disagreement doesn’t splinter solidarity. We need local defence and mutual aid structures rooted in everyday life, rather than reactive pursuits of far-right narratives and media spectacle.

Some tendencies on the left continue to back authoritarian regimes simply because they oppose the West. But true anti-imperialism isn’t about choosing sides in a geopolitical chess match, but supporting the poor, the colonised, the non-binary, the femmes, the non-whites, the children, the underdogs that suffer under any regime. We need to keep grounding our efforts in the lives and resistance of the displaced, the exploited, and the exiled. To build trust in our communities, we must come as allies and co-conspirators against the enemies at the top. And we need to rethink the ideological habits that isolate us and make us appear like a lifestyle cult rather than a political force.

There is a persistent tendency within both liberal and radical activism to treat issues like Palestine or climate collapse as isolated causes, each with their own branding, tactics, and acceptable narratives. In Palestine solidarity spaces, mass marches are welcomed—rightly—but dissenting tactics are often policed. Protesters who reject pacified, choreographed action get framed as threats to “unity,” exposing a vanguardist obsession with respectability and non-violence. Meanwhile, in environmental campaigns, urban symbolic action that leads to arrests—with minimal strategic impact—has popularised a model of low-barrier, media-friendly protest. This spectacle has come at a cost: hundreds jailed, public support thinned, and long-term grassroots organising sidelined. For all the visibility, the material impact on emissions, extraction, or capital flows remains negligible in the face of accelerating ecocide.

Palestine Action was proscribed because its targeted, disruptive tactics—like shutting down weapons factories—began to seriously impact arms production. Similarly, in Germany, Ende Gelände’s mass blockades of coal infrastructure have repeatedly disrupted mining operations and transport, forcing coal phase-out into the political mainstream. What gets criminalised is often what works.

We will not be passive observers to suffering and collapse. The system is cracking. Our task is not to patch it—but to resist with a variety of tactics—and build the ground beneath us before it falls.

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NOTES

i This section refers to info and arguments from this post: https://mronline.org/2025/06/18/the-migrant-genocide-toward-a-third-world-analysis-of-european-class-struggle/

The post This world is cracking- We need to start building appeared first on Void Network.

Regarding the uprising in Iran, another schism is becoming apparent within the movements in the West. A schism that escalates into verbal confrontation within an extremely feverish, oppressive, and competitive environment.

Written by Thanasis Kosmopoulos / RisingUtopia– Athens Greece

Translated by Tasos Sagris / Void Network

If at least those of us who express opinions from the ramparts of the movement could manage to free our thinking from the feverish compression of these times and from the competitive-narcissistic culture that has permeated us—perhaps without our even realizing it—we could produce results through fruitful disagreements.

The schism lies in how we view the situation. Some prioritize the significance of the uprising in Iran as an expression of liberation from theocratic power, with poverty and oppression as the main causes, while those “on the other side” prioritize the geopolitical dimension, interpreting the uprising as instigated by American-Zionist imperialism in order to undermine the theocratic regime and restore the Pahlavi dictatorship.

The fact that each side focuses only on one extreme (the uprising from below), while the other focuses on something entirely different (the uprising as planned subversion), taking positions at the most extreme poles, shows how much competitive logic and self-promotion through disagreement has infiltrated the movements—even among people who are organized and know how to discuss things when they meet in person. So like imprisoned mice, we tear each other apart, each one entrenched in their own narcissism.

Setting aside, however, the “psychodynamic” fields of the outlet where this text is being written, we must take a position on the events in Iran at this time. And the position states that a mass social uprising is a reality where things are suddenly disrupted, and for the umpteenth time, in the relationship between society and power. This mass-scale uprising with hundreds of dead and wounded cannot be happening out of nowhere through manipulation by an external actor. The Americans are experts at dictatorships, at abductions, and at coup practices for changing regimes that didn’t suit them, even in mini-uprisings like Maidan, which was nothing more than the surface pretext for state overthrows that had already been prepared on the Ukrainian political stage long before.

Here it’s not the same as Ukraine. No foreign power can “stage” a mass social uprising in Iran with this altar of blood. Much less transform it so that a society of 92 million consents to the change from 47 years of theocratic power to the dictatorship of any Pahlavis. In Iran today, anti-American sentiments are far more prevalent than anti-regime ones. The US knows that even with a more easily successful military coup, Iranians would hardly accept American hegemony. The possibility of failure of an instigated practice is very serious.

There is a burden that moves Iranian society to risk their lives in the streets of Iranian cities. And as always, one of the main causes and triggers of major uprisings is the sudden decrease in income and the absence of freedom. Then no one can downgrade a mass social uprising because it is spontaneous. It is not instigated.

Some commentators, highlighting the consequences of the chronic embargo on the difficult position of the poor strata, again attribute responsibility for the social uprising to the West and its sanctions, as indirect “manipulation” toward uprising. Yes, this argument also has a basis, but the embargo doesn’t mean that the state doesn’t have the ability to find a way to fix this problem. After all, Iran has very close relations with China, participating in the Shanghai alliance.

So here there is an issue: from which perspective do we see things, and from which perspective are things actually happening.

Anyone who wants to maintain an anarchist/libertarian political identity must analyze an uprising from the perspective of the insurgents.

Freedom, the human being, the community, society—these are priorities, values, ethics, a way of seeing things. Even if geopolitics weighs more heavily on events as in Ukraine, we as libertarian anarchists must see the sufferings of societies affected by this war FIRST! The possibility of intervention by the social actor FIRST! This is the imperative of our worldview. This is what made us be with the Palestinians FIRST! We are with the Palestinians and not with their flags. This is what makes us be with the insurgent Iranians FIRST! And not with the flags of the state they are subjects of. This is our perspective. The ethics of our values above whatever geopolitical correlations.

Conversely, in the case where we view this uprising from a geopolitical perspective, it is inevitable that this downgrades the insurgents, perceives them as manipulated pawns, insults people who are giving even their blood in the struggle against the state’s forces of repression. With this logic, no uprising can fail to be instigated, since all uprisings occur under active geopolitical conditions. And the social uprising for the police asssination of 15 years old student Alexis Grigoropoulos in Greece 2008 was considered by some to be instigated by Russia while by others by Turkey. I don’t think this is the way that corresponds to the perspective of all of us who are participants in the cause of social Anarchism. I believe that by focusing on geopolitics, we have internalized a managerial conception of movements that belongs to the dominant logics of “mass management,” as well as to the detached games of the geopolitical chessboard of power relations.

Explaining the stance of many comrades on social media, I believe that during the previous period with the genocide in Gaza, some of us, beyond the historical dimension of the Nakba, belatedly discovered the geopolitical dimension of things. The tragedy of the genocide not only brought American-Zionist aggression into the frame of our political critique but also quite rightly targeted it as an axis of evil—a now established conception that is confirmed by “the Trump reality” every day.

Consequently, Gaza opened a new chapter in our political understanding, a dimension that the older ones among us had taken into account anyway, but which the younger ones didn’t have, since the social movements barely dealt with geopolitics. This new ‘discovery’ was received as a revelation, when in reality not only is this far from true, but the opposite may occur: this newly acquired analytical tool we’re so eager to showcase can actually blind us even more through our over-idealization of it. This happens because many of us treat what we previously ignored as a ‘revelation,’ when it’s actually something very old and quite leftist in origin. Because an analysis that puts societies on the margins, devaluing them as absolutely controlled and manipulated, that if it doesn’t identify them with states considers them levers of geopolitical interests, is nothing but a leftist analysis derived from the spirit of Stalinism, and later during the Cold War era.

Let’s stop “reinventing the wheel” by idealizing “our new tool” because of our previous ignorance. This way of perceiving things is wrong. Let’s do some introspection to see all those “patterns” that function permanently in our understanding, and let’s rid ourselves of them, if we want to become dangerous to the State. It’s a problem when geopolitics takes precedence over the societies. The superpowers, the regional powers, the states and their moves quite logically come to the center of our perspective through the deeper desire to see the genocidal punished, with the consequence, however, that we downgrade the subject that interests us, namely that of emancipatory uprising or the corresponding social revolution.

I would say then, recognizing that in the historical time of an uprising, the geopolitical dimension also takes place—it’s quite unlikely that Mossad units are not in the field—we must focus on what is primary, which is nothing other than solidarity with a society that is rising up for a better life and for its freedom. This in itself has value. This is axiologically our libertarian way of seeing reality, without ignoring the economic, geopolitical, religious, cultural, or historical dimension of issues. Giving honor and respect to the culture of the people of the East, divesting from our critical stance any colonial Western privileges.

In conclusion, being primarily interested in the stakes of “moving” societies does not preclude taking a position on geopolitical stakes but also on every other dimension of issues. First and foremost, we are interested in the people who are rising up and the success of their struggle for a better life; secondarily, we are interested in geopolitical conflicts, which we judge primarily based on what’s good for societies, which in reality creates that anti-colonial, anti-imperialist value code.

Yes, today American-Zionism is the matrix and source of state terrorism, neo-fascism, and wars. It is a source of oppression and misery and subjugation of many societies around the world. We will not divest ourselves of our value code by supporting its opponents and raising flags of oppressive regimes on our otherwise anarchist social media profile. Our stance cannot be determined by geopolitical dynamics, nor by the hatred we have for opponents. The opponent of my opponent cannot be my friend.

Our value system has at its center social revolution for freedom, common ownership, equality, horizontality. That is, social emancipation, which like a polar star forms an axial direction in a straight line. Imperialism, colonialism, nation-states are forms of oppression and exploitation. They can even coexist. We too can stand against them, being critical without betraying our principles.

In this way we must meet with the struggles of Iranians as well as all those who rise up against the state/capital system.

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Written by Thanasis Kosmopoulos / RisingUtopia– Athens Greece

The post On the Uprising in Iran and the Schism Within the Movements in the West appeared first on Void Network.

Not possessing prophetic visions, it will be difficult to predict what forms Anarchism will take in the 21st century, as this depends on the geographical, cultural, political, social, and temporal context. Undoubtedly, struggles for the expansion of spaces of freedom, equality in differences, and solidarity—individual and collective—(including and especially among strangers) will always constitute the axes around which the specifically appropriate forms and modes of conflict will revolve, depending on the context of anarchism, or rather anarchisms.

I will briefly focus on three global scenarios, not alternatives, but rather intersecting yet not hierarchically descending, within which twenty-first-century anarchists will strive to identify the best forms of action. There is clearly a fourth, linked to gender issues, but other contributions will provide us with general and specific features and contextual objectives of struggle. Of course, these scenarios do not exclude or downplay the more common, more everyday, and perhaps more local spheres of struggle, whose importance is crucial to our rooting in the territories where we live. However, in my opinion, global scenarios will also “over-determine” local or traditional conflicts, changing their forms and modalities and imparting, in my view, significant twists.

The first is climate change, which alters the planet’s living conditions, jeopardising the survival of its ecosystems, with the risk of demographic conflicts, migratory movements, and the violent exploitation of resources (fertile land, water), etc. The nomadism typical (and even original) of the human species cannot be stopped by state or “natural” borders, such will be the pressure of migration in search of better living conditions. If the pace of exploitation of humanity’s resources (land and water, first and foremost) is not reversed, increasingly bloody conflicts will erupt, considering that half the world’s population is of working age, and a quarter of them live in rural areas, where 80% of global poverty exists. This is without considering the informal, obscure, and invisible work that escapes ILO or World Bank statistics. In these conditions, which it would be unworthy to call “emergency”—so endemic and reiterated are they by the dynamics of power and inequality on a global scale—the approach to problems can only hinge on bottom-up self-organisation, to mitigate the destructive effects of current climate policies pursued by unscrupulous state and business elites. It is from this practice of solidarity and self-organisation that an anarchist ethos is forged: a training ground for creativity in horizontal problem-solving that will gradually extend to the complete reorganisation of social life according to libertarian practices and attitudes. It is therefore time for the livability of and on our planet to enter the political agenda of social anarchism with determination, since we cannot count on being among the elite who will migrate to the Moon or Mars following Elon Musk & Co.

The second global scenario is the recourse to war as a challenge to global hegemony in the 21st century, with the risks of nuclear annihilation and mass extermination. Already at the close of the last millennium, many American scholars were questioning which would be the hegemonic power in the second half of the 21st century, seeing China and its allies (including Russia) as the most likely competitor against which to pursue policies of containment and aggressive counterbalancing. It’s not difficult to imagine the same in China, only that analyses and studies are not easily accessible, let alone legible. After all, history has never seen smooth and peaceful successions of global hegemony—quite the opposite. It is no coincidence, then, and not just today, that we are witnessing a growing militarisation of societies, which already directly results in the disintegration of hard-won “rights,” even without losing the pretence of (pseudo)democratic representation, with the reduction of constitutional states to electoral-parliamentary autocracies. Freedom of action, speech, expression, the ability to shape one’s life as one sees fit, and the ability to adopt non-conformist customs and traditions are all practices wrested with difficulty from previous generations and, in some cases, from the living. Whether they are constitutionalised or translated into legal norms is of little importance: positive law grants and takes away based on more or less strengthened parliamentary majorities. The path will make the difference.

By militarisation, we must not and cannot merely evoke the visible presence of signs of armed power (army, police forces, armaments, war industries, etc.). We must address the internalisation of a warmongering and bellicose culture, which arms consciences from a very young age, pressuring them with violent models for solving everyday problems and overcoming the obstacles that life throws at us at every step. Cultural models in which violence is exalted because it is simulated—game over, and we begin again—life as a video game in which you kill and are killed, but then you rise again in a limitless and infinite fight. It is no coincidence that entertainment video games fuel and are in turn fueled by military simulations, by autonomous and automatic weaponry that transform war in its forms, anaesthetising its wounds and physical traumas and transferring them to a psychic sphere. This is at least for those who attack from a position of technological supremacy, not for those who suffer its effects, as every victim of war knows.

We must not underestimate or minimise the hybrid militarisation that insinuates itself from cyberspace into our pockets via digital devices. These devices are not only the source of capitalist surveillance for commercial marketing purposes, but also, and above all, the control exerted by governments and private companies, which now possess an infinite amount of knowledge related to our tastes, our actions, our physical and virtual experiences, which are transformed into numerical data easily processed by algorithms, resulting in a unique mass profiling —and this may not sound contradictory—that is useful for predicting and even guiding our future behaviour.

Which brings us to the third global scenario: the advent of digital technologies, and AI specifically, which is literally revolutionising the way of life in our societies, not only in the areas of living labour, which can be replaced by robots and various machines, nor only in the ways in which “political” opinions are channelled during elections. The split between the corporeal, “real” sphere and the “virtual” dimension, whose effects are just as real, intertwine, delineating the formation of a subjectivity very different from the one we have become accustomed to on the material terrain of social classes and the balance of power. In an era of extreme individualism, advocated and encouraged by the neoliberal policies of recent decades, the collective sphere has shattered to be “resurrected” in the relationship between the self and the screen of my digital device; Physical sociality has in some ways evaporated in favour of a virtual “sociality,” managed by proprietary platforms, within which a fiction of communication and dialogue is enacted with just as many other selves, each connected via their own screen. The fiction of having a following of followers, of having tons of friends: in effect, we are unknowingly immersed in a bubble, within which my opinions resonate, becoming convictions as soon as I see them confirmed by others who think exactly like me. The end of the pluralism of ideas, excluded from echo chambers, the end of the emergence of dissent, the end of dialectical confrontation between different people. And when these virtual expulsions resurface in the space-time of corporeal existence, being unaccustomed of relating to different others turns into gratuitous, senseless, unexpected violence, except as a “defensive” form of a psychology devoid of real sociality, precisely because it is imbued with “social” surrogates.

Neoliberal individualism, further translocated into the digital universe, produces conformist individuals, diversified replicas of a machine matrix whose limits and technological advances we have likely become prostheses, experimentally testing. We think we are the ones using the devices, but perhaps it’s precisely the opposite. Outside of any community of reference, disoriented and tossed from one platform to another, what kind of subjectivity will ultimately consolidate? What community could give rise to the communism of goods and services? What critical and diverse subject could emerge in the increasingly pressing relationship between the human and the machine?

The new ways in which we feel we are subjects of ourselves, aware and critical of reality, push us to deepen and diversify our analytical tools, to seize new opportunities for “social(i)” connections from which we can reconstitute a strong destituent community capable of imagining and therefore experimenting with collective utopias organized around the pivot of the absence of power.

Written by Salvo Vaccaro for Umanità Nova (Italy)

Machine Translation in English- edited by Blade Runner. 

Summary of a presentation at the Carrara Conference (11-12 October 2025) on occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Italian Anarchist Federation.

SOURCE: https://freedomnews.org.uk/2025/12/17/21st-century-anarchism/

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Is Existentialism closer to Anarchism than Marxism?

written by William L. Remley

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Every philosopher must run the gauntlet of time. Philosophical ideas fall in and out of favor, but the acid test is whether we continue to debate a philosopher’s ideas long after they have left the scene. The anniversary of Jean-Paul Sartre’s birthday in 2019, almost forty years since his death, was an appropriate moment to look back on the legacy of a philosopher whose work helped to define an era, and whose ideas continue to resonate with the political climate today.

Professor Richard Falk places Sartre alongside Noam Chomsky and Edward Said as one of the few individuals worthy of the title ‘public intellectual’. Yet towards the end of his life, even as Sartre moved further in the direction of political engagement, he lamented that his politics were not radical enough; perhaps that is why Sartre’s political philosophy is so highly disputed.

Since the publication of Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960, scholars have largely interpreted Sartre’s political philosophy as ‘existential Marxism’: a critical appropriation of Marxism. Sartre encouraged this reception by often professing his affinity with Marxism, even stating that existentialism was parasitic to Marxism, a point he later retracted. But commentators who emphasize the influence of Marx overlook the signs of Sartre’s skepticism. Far from being a supporter of the French Communist Party, he rejected outright the dogmatic Marxism of dialectical materialism underpinning its ideology.

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“If one reads my books, one will realize that I have not changed profoundly, and that I have always remained an anarchist.”

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While Marx’s influence is overemphasized, the role of anarchism deserves far more airtime than it currently gets. Sartre said it himself: “if one reads my books, one will realize that I have not changed profoundly, and that I have always remained an anarchist”. Not only do Sartre’s anarchist undertakings underscore his political positions, from his earliest writings all the way through to the post-war period, they also provide a far more radical foundation for his ideas.

The clearest anarchist element in Sartre’s political thought is the pursuit of a society free from authoritarianism. In the early 1950s, Sartre began sketching out his vision for an ideal society, brought about by the overthrow of existing systems of oppression through revolutionary activity. In the Critique, Sartre argues that the authority-oppression paradigm is made possible by institutionalization, where groups become conditioned to eschew individual freedom, adopting serialities and their concomitant social impotence. Individual freedom is immobilized by this process but not vanquished; the potential to reform as a group-in-fusion and direct their praxis towards an ideal survives.

Sartre’s anarchist contemporaries condemned institutions which were based on coercion and authoritarianism. The state and centralized authority received the brunt of their scrutiny, with many believing that the state was illegitimate, had no right to exist, and its abolishment would eliminate many social evils. The same concerns can be seen today in the activities of the Occupy Movement, the Invisible Committee, and the Tarnac 9, all of which have come to be known as Insurrectionary Anarchism. Sartre’s account of group formation demonstrates that not only did he share such concerns about coercion and authority, he argued forcefully against the oppression of institutionalized authority long before contemporary anarchists took up the cause. Sartre’s revolutionary solution likewise entailed the eradication of the existing order.

Yet it is the degree of coercion that interested Sartre most. The philosopher’s critique of the state was that it attempted to convert human beings into automata, extending the machine metaphor to associate institutionalized bureaucracy with nefarious analytic reason. In his view, the practico-inert surrounds and conditions human existence through its seen and unseen apparatuses, representing a servitude to mechanical forces designed to quash individual freedom.

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“I have always been in agreement with anarchists, who are the only ones to have conceived of a whole man to develop through social action and whose chief characteristic is freedom”.

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In place of a state, anarchism advocates peaceful coexistence based on social freedom and our capacity for mutual aid, cooperation, respect, and communal relations. Sartre agreed, arguing that only individuals are sovereign, but that humans are united to each other and the world around them through their interactions, particularly in the workspace. According to Sartre, work is an essential attitude of human reality, founded on a need to collaborate with others based on an agreed mutual dependence. As he pointed out, “I have always been in agreement with anarchists, who are the only ones to have conceived of a whole man to develop through social action and whose chief characteristic is freedom”. While the individual is paramount, dependency prompts the being-outside-ourselves which is essential to Sartre’s concept of selfhood.

Sartre conceived the relation between humans and elements in the social sphere as ‘interest’. Interest is a univocal relation of interiority that provides the connection for humans to their environment. In contrast, subjectivity is derided as an abstraction: a verdict compelling everyone to willingly carry out the commands pronounced by society. For Sartre, interest is not our subjective, interior decisions concerning our existence; rather, it is the discovery of our being-outside-ourselves. There are no innate ideas or fixed essences, no ‘wheels in the head’ that direct our actions, as Max Stirner suggested. Instead, we are at all times situationally determined by others.

The final element of anarchist thought which I argue is echoed in Sartre’s political philosophy is the immediate and practical proposal for change: a socio-political theory that embraces, among other things, a notion of praxis. Indications of this praxis are embraced by anarchists today, including the decentralization of political and economic authority, worker self-management, and freedom of expression. There are several themes which reappear consistently throughout Sartre’s work, and the theory of praxis has to count among the most prevalent.

One of the foundational aspects of the Critique is Sartre’s desire to expose the profound dialectical relationship that unites praxis to the outside world. And on reviewing Sartre’s earlier work, we see that the intent of revolution is not only to alter the world, but to re-create our collective situation. In order to accomplish this task, praxis becomes essential, since praxis not only constitutes individual authenticity, it also eradicates the impotency of the practico-inert.

But what does Sartre mean by praxis? While the concept is somewhat nebulous, it should be understood as the historical whole determining our power at any given moment as it conditions our attitude toward an entire plethora of dichotomies, such as the possible and impossible. This occurs because praxis prescribes the limits of our actions as well as our possibilities for a future. For Sartre, the collectivity is faced with a choice to submit to the course of the world or contribute to the shaping of it. The force separating these paths is action. Action forces the individual to contextualize the event within a future possessed by everyone.

Having explored all of these shared traits, one thing is certain; Sartre’s political philosophy extends far beyond Marxism. Intrinsically linked to anarchist thought, Sartre believes that only bureaucratization, decentralization, and democratization, where the dominant forces renounce their grip on the social structure, can overcome the hegemonic, hierarchical, and oppressive nature of contemporary society.

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SOURCE: https://iai.tv/articles/sartres-anarchist-philosophy-auid-1242

The post Sartre’s Anarchist Philosophy appeared first on Void Network.

By political philosophy, I mean a way of thinking about politics, institutions and decision-making. How people arbitrate their business with one another, theories of government – or self-government – or the abolition of all hierarchy. I liked to boil down anarchism into a few pithy phrases like, “anarchism is about no one having power over anyone else.”

I was not wrong. Anarchism is indeed about all of these things. It is indeed a political philosophy. It is indeed about how people take decisions together and manage their affairs collectively. But I thought this was its philosophy in toto, that there was nothing more to it. It was a way of thinking that was separate from our interior realities. It is an external philosophy, above all about how we behave towards one another.

These ideas take you far in analysing the current political and economic situation and working out how to reform it and replace it. In place of a top-down system of government, we need a system where decisions are made by the mass, including everyone with a stake. In place of an economic system controlled by the few with massive wealth, we need one where shares are equal, both in terms of wealth but also in terms of agency; where everyone gets a say over the economic affairs that affect them, whether in the workplace or society at large. The individual and society are at the heart of this idea. Individuals must be free to act as they please, but always taking into account the needs of others – a fair and equal negotiation (this isn’t the most purely libertarian form of anarchism, of course, more socialist libertarianism).

But who is that individual and how do they think? Anarchists are sceptical of formal religion, seeing it as another form of social control where agency is denied the individual in favour of a rigid orthodoxy enforced hierarchically – most often by men. The claim that god exists is seen as a veil, used to conceal many human wrongs and injustices, excused as a universal salve and explanation. Anarchism rejects religion: no gods, no masters.

Thus, I had been sceptical of those who sometimes called themselves spiritual anarchists. What is spiritualism but another kind of religion that confuses and misleads us from our earthly realities? I saw what can loosely be called spiritualism as narcissistic and selfish, with its focus on the individual soul and its needs and expression. Some of those I saw talking of spiritualism retreated from the battleground of society into drugs and other forms of refuge, both physical and mental. The battle is in our cities and streets, here and now, I argued crossly.

But those same ‘spiritualists’ claimed to me that there could not be revolution of the whole of society without revolutionising the way that individuals think within it. You couldn’t expect that society would adopt practices of equality, respect and inclusion unless we ourselves were transformed from the rationalism and analytic thinking that sees everything as structure or transaction. The interior needed to be reformed too. You couldn’t have revolution in one without revolution in the other.

I have come to think that they might be right. At the heart of all anarchism is how we treat other people. Anarchism demands that this treatment is always respectful and egalitarian: no one can coerce another, whether by overt means or subtle. My kind of anarchism demands that we treat others as they wish, not as we wish (which is, by the way, an explicit rejection of the so-called ‘golden rule’, under which we treat others as we would wish to be treated. Instead we must attend to what they say they want, not what we think they want). We must give up all notions of domination, of influence and getting others to do what we want. We must give up all power.

I once worked in government. I was agog with power, convinced that I worked among an elite few who understood the needs of society – in my case, in foreign policy and diplomacy – better than society understood itself. This fed my ego and structured my life around career and status. It has been a hard road to abandon these pillars of my sense of worth and self. If I don’t have power, what am I? If I cannot tell others what to do, what value do my ideas and wishes have? If it’s just me, what am I?

I have found that I need to believe in something. I’m not sure what I would call it. But I suspect my spiritualist friends would call it just that: spiritual need. It’s a belief that there are values and meanings outside ourselves but which animate and inspire our interior realities. Religions might name this thing god, expressed through litany. But my litany is anarchism, and I’m not willing to call that guiding spirit god. It is more earthly, it is more human.

I identify it by observing the core of anarchist practice: the interaction with others. How we treat other people. In anarchism, that interaction must be guided by consideration and caring, the putting of the needs of others on an equal footing to our own. At least: in its most extreme iteration, it is the erasure of self. Lao Tzu talks about this in the Tao te Ching. It is having power by giving up all power. He reached this conclusion thousands of years ago. It is a harmony between how we see and treat others and how we treat ourselves.

There is a word for this practice: it is Love.

Without this ‘spiritual’ core, anarchism struggles to make sense. If it is judged in the terms of current capitalist culture, it is not necessarily a more efficient or productive practice: it does not necessarily produce more goods or make more money.

What it accomplishes is in fact of infinite worth: the beauty of humans living with one another in love and respect and equality. These are abstract, ineffable things that cannot be measured in euros, pounds or dollars. Indeed, this stuff is beyond all terms themselves – and this is why it’s hard to put it into words too. It is on a plane above all that. And if you want to call this a ‘spiritual’ plane, I am happy with that. What goes on in the spirit or the soul matters, for it matters to the exterior reality too. What we believe in ourselves is intrinsic to how we engage with the world. One doesn’t work without the other.

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Carne Ross is a former British diplomat, author of The Leaderless Revolution: How ordinary people will take power and change politics in the 21st century, and the subject of the film Accidental Anarchist

http://www.accidentalanarchist.net/

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Geopolitics for anarchists?

Geopolitics tends to be a field of analysis for experts and journalists interested in the competing fortunes of nation-states, their alliances and institutions. They bring to it a level of strategizing similar to sports commentators at Sunday football: they understand the repertoire of plays, they can suss out strengths and weaknesses, but they will never deconstruct the history of the game, ask about the relationship between the bench and the field, the coach and the owner, the spectators and the players (that is, beyond a democratic spectacle: do they get along? are the fans happy with their team?). They will not dissect the architecture of the stadium or the commercial break, and they certainly will not wonder, is there another kind of game we could be playing? They need the game to go on forever. If the game stops, they disappear.

Some anarchists might think, if we want to abolish all nation-states, why engage with their irrelevant strategy games? Why understand them on their own terms?

It is absolutely true that anarchists will never show up as a player on the Risk board of geopolitics. We have entirely been drawn off that map. And that is as it should be. If we are anarchists, we are approaching strategy and power from a completely different place, and with completely different desires and methods.

But currently, it is the geopolitical system of states and capitalism that is most active in producing the future we are forced to inhabit. Knowing what range of futures are likely helps us understand the system we are up against and it helps us prepare.

If you think the zombie apocalypse—or really any apocalypse movie—presents a realistic scenario for what systemic collapse looks like, then you will be engaged in the wrong kind of preparation.

Over the last two decades, I’ve seen numerous anarchists make serious predictions about where we were headed, and what dangers we faced. This is a bold thing to do, and a good thing, because it allows us to test our theories. All the predictions I remember have turned out to be wrong.

• Trump did not launch a coup: in fact, John Bolton was speaking from experience when he said a coup requires a great deal more organization.
• Fascists are not close to taking over: they are primarily a danger for people at the street level and in the way they push the center rightward in terms of acceptable policy for a democratic government to enact.
• Promoting antifascism in the midst of a growing antiracist movement was a mistake, a step backwards. As it did in its previous iterations, antifascism decentered questions of whiteness and colonialism and allowed the Left to gain ground in what had previously been anti-state movements: it left us flatfooted when real fascism faltered but the democratic State plowed forward.
• Democracy is facing a crisis, but it still poses the biggest danger to us: spreading this awareness more generally might have saved some of our most powerful movements—in Chile and in Greece—from falling into fatal strategic dead ends. It would also have improved the initial framing of the Occupy and 15M movements, allowing them to develop in far more radical directions.
• “Late capitalism” or “the final stage of capitalism” were declared after WWI and it’s still chugging along. Discarding Marxism would allow us to more clearly see capitalism’s vital strategic, state-driven element: states and their institutions proactively open up new territories to ensure capitalist expansion.
• Being on the look-out for these new frontiers would have given us a head start in identifying the mainstream climate movement and green energy as the biggest threats to life on this planet. Now, we have to play catch up.

It worries me immensely that, as far as I have seen, people who made false predictions didn’t own up to their mistakes. Doing so would have been brave, honest, and it would have strengthened us immensely, giving us more chances to sharpen our theoretical tools, to hone our strategic intuition.

And I think that ego, that headlong retreat from our mistakes, has been a major factor shunting radicals around the world into even bigger mistakes, obvious mistakes. Frustrated, would-be revolutionaries are turning to single-issue activism, municipal democracy, or the latest Stalinist cults with robustly defined organizations, a carefully curated prole machismo, but no actual engagement or relevance to social conflict.

Which way the world system?

To summarize, a world system is a system that understands itself as global and that mediates political conflict and the flow of resources and information in accordance with a certain logic. Each successive world system has a leading state, but that leader does not have the power to control everything that happens in the world system: rather, they are the architect who at a critical moment achieves the power and legitimacy, the hegemony, to design a new world system that all the relevant players agree to take part in.

After World War II, the US took over from the UK and became the architect of the next world system, centered around a putatively universal order of states governed by the UN, headquartered in New York, and a capitalist regime of free trade and investment overseen by the Bretton Woods institutions like the IMF.

The US and its closest allies are no longer the main motors of economic growth, and the share of new investments they capture is diminishing. Politically, the NATO bloc had been expanding its web of alliances into territory that had long belonged in the Russian sphere of influence. Russia is pushing back in Ukraine, but divisions within NATO and the EU have recently immobilized those alliances, so that while Russia continues to receive armaments and financial support from its allies, critical funding for Ukraine has stalled.

Elsewhere, Russia has suffered humiliating defeats, as in its inability to support Armenia against the expansionism of Azerbaijan, which is backed by Turkey. When Turkey joined NATO during the Cold War, this was a major victory for the military alliance as it constituted a partial encirclement of Russia. But now, Turkey is acting on a strategic level like a non-aligned country, even as it continues to wield the ability to block consensus within NATO.

In the Cold War, the non-aligned countries consisted of states that were far weaker economically and militarily than the US and Russia, but that could incrementally improve their position by keeping their doors open to both blocs, essentially seeing who would give them a better deal.

So Turkey is effectively pursuing its own interests, against both the US/EU and against Russia, as well as other mid-weight rivals to its south and east, for example in the way it has weaponized Sunni fundamentalist groups related to the Islamic State against both Iran and the Kurds.

Futures

When a world system is faltering, the general options are:

a) the system successfully renovates and reinvents itself, with the old leader launching a reformed architecture

b) a new leader secures the power and legitimacy to win adherence to a new architecture, beginning a new world system

c) people increase their ability to fight back against the State and we win a global revolution, destroying the world system and preventing a new one from taking its place

d) the current world system remains in place, corroding and descending increasingly into civil war until eventually option a, b, or c occurs.

A New American Century

I’m making this reference to the Project for a New American Century, the group of neoconservative intellectuals who backed Bush II and believed they had the strategic plan for revitalizing the US as the undisputed world leader, ironically. The reason is that no player has done more than the US to undermine US hegemony.

The foreign and economic policy championed by Bush II and carried on in some ways by Trump and in other ways by Biden, has probably destroyed any chance the US has of restoring the global architecture that it put in place on the heels of its triumph over the Nazis.

The fact that no one in the US or British political elite seem aware of this fact only reconfirms it. And though the level of self-defeating ignorance is astounding, it should not be surprising, as capitalists usually only understand capitalism at a superficial level, and statists usually only understand the State at a superficial level, similar to sports commentators going over the latest plays.

When the US was at its most powerful, in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, immediately after winning the Cold War, the hubris of the neoconservative movement in the political class, and the unbridled avarice of the neoliberal technocracy amongst the financial institutions, directly destroyed the basis for US hegemony.

The IMF, G7, and the whole circus of humanitarian NGOs and international investors were blatant in the ways they benefited from corruption, authoritarian regimes, and internecine civil wars in recently decolonized countries; how by “development” they meant absolute dependence on a single export commodity, so that every poor country was not only completely vulnerable to political pressure from the US and Europe, they might also be plunged into starvation based on the vagaries of the currency market; and how, after the ‘70s, what they were most interested in was making cutthroat profit on the basis of sheer financial speculation rather than any productive growth that, from a capitalist standpoint, could be seen as sustainable. In other words, the entire Lawrence Summers crowd didn’t hide the fact that they were absolute vampires who didn’t even believe their own dogma, and the entire Rumsfeld and Bolton crowd couldn’t hide how ignorant they were about the world, about politics, and about the countries they believed they could dominate.

US power was not masked any better on the political stage.

The US and UK could have accepted occasional disappointments, not always getting their favored outcomes in international conflicts. This theater of “playing fair” could have generated widespread faith in and reliance on the United Nations framework. And this would have buttressed US power in the long run, since the UN was authored by the US and it headquarters global politics in New York City. But instead, they misunderstood the hegemonic and relational nature of power, and thought that having an unprecedented amount of power meant that they could act unilaterally without undermining the basis of that power.

This would be like if Apple had gotten everyone in the world to use Apple computers, but then didn’t let people produce any media on an Apple computer that was critical of Apple. What does it matter if you trash talk X, if the only forum to do it on is X?

By unilaterally invading Iraq twice and killing millions of people, by flagrantly overthrowing social democratic (but capitalist!) regimes that didn’t favor a handpicked list of Western investors, by protecting Israel from any slightest slap on the wrist to the point where nearly the entirety of Israeli society now feels entitled to commit genocide—not out of view, the way the US sometimes does, but in front of the cameras, and they’re the ones holding the camera, smiling and cracking jokes—the US and UK have destroyed the legitimacy and functionality of their own political instrument. The US (and under its protection, Israel) flagrantly ignores UN resolutions whenever it wants. It acts like a “rogue state” within the interstate system that it designed, and designed to its advantage. And this cowboy attitude has always characterized US foreign policy (except, arguably, under FDR), but it accelerated under Reagan and especially Bush II.

Trump aped the arrogance of it with several unilateral moves, increasing blank check support to Israel, for example, and retreating from the very question of strategy with a non-interventionist tendency that left key US allies in the lurch. The Biden administration, meanwhile, has tried to press a reset button on strategic thinking, but they’re acting like it’s 1996.

Israel was once an important military laboratory for the US and a nuclear option in the world’s key oil producing hub, at a time when a pan-Arab alliance posed the threat of controlling both the oil and the Suez canal. Now, Israel is largely a liability; Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran are all aggressively trying to redraw power lines in West Asia and none of them rely exclusively on the US as a patron; Yemen is effectively threatening shipping through the Suez canal; and most West Asian oil is exported to India and East Asian economies, primarily China.

As Israel carries on with its blatant genocide against Palestinians, the UN is even proving inept at delivering humanitarian aid and barely even registers as a potential mediator. The only actors able to target Israel with any real consequences are Hizbollah, the Houthis, and Revolutionary Guard-linked militias. The chief actor in the mediation process is Qatar. In other words, all the actors who are gaining in legitimacy and power are allies of Iran, which is the only one of the three regional powers that the US has no leverage or alliance with.

Meanwhile, the US is damaging its relationship with European governments. Trump in particular showed the EU and NATO that they could not assume the US would always be reliable, and this is a direct result of the dysfunction of democracy as the world system falls apart. Democratic mechanisms still provide an important release mechanism that can pacify and incorporate resistance movements before they become revolutionary. But in the US, Brazil, Hungary, Poland, and the UK, rightwing populist electoral victories have shown that actually, democracy is dangerous to power because it is not total bullshit. Up until now, electoral promises were all rubbish because no new political administration endangered the underlying economic policies of neoliberalism. The technocrats didn’t have to worry: their machine would keep humming along.

Even progressive electoral victories in Greece, Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere let the capitalists know: nothing to worry about here. And the democratic states have proved capable of dismantling actually fascist movements like Golden Dawn in Greece before they proved too much of a threat. But the rightwing white populists like Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, and Johnson not only eroded the functionality of democratic governance, they also threatened the stability of the technocratic status quo, scaring the hell out of investors who had been living in a Candyland made just for them, and they burst the assumed durability of key political formations like the European Union or the US-European alliance.

Europe—long a valuable container for cultural and political legitimacy, given the white supremacy at the heart of the world system—has for the first time in nearly a century had to consider its separate interests, and this is already showing up in a markedly different approach towards China. In the US, the political elite already consider China an adversary worthy of a new Cold War, whereas in Europe, China is considered a partially reliable strategic partner. If something does not change quickly, the US will be relegated to the same status.

And without reliable US support, the EU will have to bring itself up to war readiness, able to dissuade Russia from further invasions. In order to find a balance that Russia won’t risk upsetting, that may mean abandoning Ukraine to a permanent partition.

From the perspective of US power, none of this looks good. To have any chance of renovating the world system it authored, the US would need to make grand gestures in order to expiate their rotten brand:

• supporting Palestinian statehood and breaking Israeli public support for its current ruling class by wrecking the Israeli economy
• normalizing relations with China and Iran but ensuring favorable investment and trade deals with putative democracies like India, Taiwan, and South Korea
• making a convincing, substantial pitch for rebranded international investment that distinguishes itself from the mercenary monetary policy of the IMF by assuring more autonomy for “sustainable development” directed by the local ruling classes of formerly colonized countries, etc.
• unveiling a convincing plan for a global transition to green energy that accelerates the current wave of profitable investment, extraction, and production, while also including a “global justice” element that gives meaningful resources to poor countries to participate in the transition and improve their economic standing

And internally:

• co-opting abolition for the second time (the first time being in 1865) by decriminalizing drugs, eliminating prison for all nonviolent offenders, and expanding the use of unarmed neighborhood patrol cops
• instituting universal healthcare.

The likelihood of this happening, however, seems minuscule, given how little awareness the current ruling class has of all the ways they are sabotaging their own power. They even seem to think that projecting force is the way for them to stay in control. But no one is contesting that the US has the strongest military in the world. They don’t need to. All rivals need to show is that the US military is not effective at creating the outcomes desired by its ruling class. That was demonstrated in Afghanistan. The question was brought to a costly standstill in Iraq. And now the US is stomping up and down the Red Sea and the Mediterranean firing missiles into Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, puffing out its chest and demonstrating that if you hit me with a straw I’ll hit you with a hammer but what they’re actually showing is their ineffectiveness, their willingness to destabilize the region out of pure hubris, and their permanent contempt for any other country’s sovereignty, even that of their allies. This seriously damages faith in the US as a potential world leader because one of the key changes from the British world system to the American world system was decolonization, and in the wake of World War II the US positioned itself as a champion of freedom from dictatorship and freedom from aggression.

US force is irrelevant. For two years, Ukraine has fought Russia to a standstill, the second strongest military in the world, destroying million dollar Russian tanks with thousand dollar drones. The Houthis are now using drones to threaten shipping in one of the most important commercial waterways in the global economy. The effectiveness of multibillion dollar US missile defense systems is moderate. Meanwhile, US missile strikes from bases, ships, and planes all across the region are worse than ineffective, because they are strengthening rivals and forcing nonaligned countries to realign themselves at a more cautious distance from both the US and Israel.

Instead of projecting force, the US needs to be projecting intelligence, creating solutions to the many crises pummeling the world system. The current US ruling class does not see the actual problems, and is not proposing any real solutions. The chance of a change of guard that pushes the US and European elite in a more intelligent direction is extremely low, based on a glance at the electoral map.

From the Trumps, throwing gasoline on the fire at home and abroad, to the Bidens, trying the same old techniques and hoping for different results, the political mainstream is at war with itself. Politicians, technocrats, and investors would receive the kind of proposals actually needed to save the current world system like some bizarre mix of treason, progressive nonsense, and socialistic revolution.

A BRICS road

At this juncture it seems unlikely that the US could rescue its project of global dominance, but until an effective new world leader steps forward with a convincing new architecture, that means the current system will drag on, descending increasingly into conflict, civil war, and even a neofascist regimes in a few regions, until a decisive change occurs in one direction or another.

In the essay, “Anarchy in World Systems,” the argument is made that that next global architect would probably be China, or potentially India.

Before exploring those possibilities, let’s take a look at a feature of this theoretical framework we’re using, the world system. The most relevant theorist is Giovanni Arrighi, who was combining a largely materialist analysis of global economic flows with a largely anarchist analysis of power and social design under the modern state. He doesn’t credit the anarchists of course, but he’s an academic, so that’s to be expected.

In the first edition of the book published in 1994, Arrighi does that bold thing: he makes a prediction. And he gets it completely wrong, saying that Japan will be the architect and leader of the next world system. In a later edition of the book, however, he does the decent thing and acknowledges that he was wrong and that it would likely be China. He doesn’t, however, offer a convincing analysis of what flaw in the theory led him to make that mistake.

“Anarchy in World Systems” argues that his mistake comes from Arrighi favoring the materialist side of his own theoretical tool over the anarchist side. Capital accumulation is not the driving force of the world system. It is a necessary fuel, but capital accumulation does not happen without the architecture and the strategic planning of states. We can realize how obvious this should be if we let ourselves see, in hindsight, how ridiculous the prediction was that Japan would be the number one global power. This prediction was based on statistics for Japan’s economic growth, leaving out the non-quantifiable factor: strategic planning and power contests by states.

Japan could not possibly be the next global architect because it had never won a war against the old leader, the US, so it had no bubble of autonomy within which to begin creating a new design. Once Japan challenged the US—at a purely economic level—in the ‘80s, US planners simply turned off the faucet. After the Korean War, though, China did have that military victory, and with it a bubble of regional autonomy.

So could China be the architect of the next global system, and what would that look like?

For starters, China does not appear to have the military strength that earlier world system architects enjoyed. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the British had the most powerful fleet, giving them a global military reach, and at the end of World War II the US had the most effective military, the largest carrier fleet, nuclear bombs, long range bombers, and military bases with runways large enough for these bombers, all across the world.

Today, China has advanced technology but only recently achieved a blue water fleet, and only recently went intercontinental, setting up military bases in eastern Africa. However, this distinction may not be as important as it was in the past.

There is no state that the Chinese government needs to overthrow or conquer in order to take its place as a global architect (Taiwan comes close to holding this status, although for reasons far more relevant to Chinese ruling class ideology than to China’s stature on the world stage; Taiwan, in fact, could become China’s Israel). In the current system, open warfare has shown diminishing returns. No major powers have gone head-to-head since 1945, and all the greatest interventions of the two world powers (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Iraq) cost them more than they gained.

The only military capacity China would likely need to take on the role of global leader is the capacity for deterrence and for stabilization operations. Deterrence simply means that they pose enough of a military threat that no other state would directly attack China or the smaller countries that China considers to be in its primary zone of influence, more on this in a moment. Stabilization operations would require China to project force internationally to protect the flow of commerce and protect major investments. Its bases in Eastern Africa are well positioned to help it police the Red Sea and Suez Canal route through which a great deal of commerce flows between Europe and Asia.

Taking this analysis further, though, would be making the mistaken assumption that one state alone needs to be the sole military and economic powerhouse to launch a new world system. From the Westphalia system to the United Nations, all previous world systems relied on a strong degree of cooperation (between nation-states), and if not consensus, then at least consent.

We can see this more clearly when we look at BRICS, which is the most likely vehicle currently prefiguring a new world system. BRICS, together with the New Development Bank and other linked institutions, provide a counterweight to the G7 and the IMF. They are organized by the powerhouses of the so-called developing world: Brazil, Russia, India, and China starting in 2009, with South Africa added a year later. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates joined at the beginning of this year.

Clearly, BRICS is achieving important growth, with the original five constituting 45% of the world’s population and 33% of the world’s GDP (or 27% if not adjusted for purchasing power parity). Compare that to NATO (which is a military alliance and not an economic alliance like BRICS), with 31 members who account for 55% of global military spending, 12% of the world population, and over a third of the world’s GDP.

Meanwhile, the New Development Bank, headquartered in Shanghai, has total capital of $100 billion, with $34 billion in authorized lending annually. This is much less than the $932 billion that make up the IMF’s total resources, but is still nothing to sneeze at.

Both the UN and IMF were founded inside the US (with the first UN General Assembly convening in the UK, the closest US ally). The main US rival, the USSR, was included in the UN, since the purpose was to be a universal body for all modern states, but the US consistently used the UN to constrain its rivals, or immobilized the UN when it couldn’t get its way. And the USSR was not initially included in the IMF and similar financial institutions, though over time they were invited and integrated. In other words, the US system purported to be universal, just in ways that subtly benefited the US and its allies.

BRICS, on the other hand, is pursuing a different strategy. The alliance gives itself the possibility of being counterhegemonic by not pretending to be universal. It is very explicitly a counterweight to the dominant economic institutions and alliances (the G7 and IMF). And yet, it offers more meaningful collaboration. Especially at its founding in 2009, China was the economic powerhouse of the alliance. China has ongoing political and economic rivalries, as well as border disputes, with both Russia and India. Yet both of those countries were invited to form the ground floor, and the founding summit was held not in China but in Russia (though, not without significance, in Yekaterinburg, which is in Asia).

There is nothing revolutionary about the Chinese-authored system. It is absolutely a continuation of the global system of capitalism that has ruled the world with a tighter and tighter grip since the 1500s.

It does demonstrate some different organizing principles, though. We can identify the following principles in the US-led system.

national decolonization: the US distinguished itself from Great Britain, the biggest colonizer in world history, by championing the cause of decolonization… within a certain framework. Every nation-state should have a government along Western lines, but colonized populations were not allowed to self-define. The borders were usually defined by the former colonizers, and independence would only be granted once the former colonizers and the US decided that a new (local) ruling class was ready. Thus, most oppressive power dynamics from the colonial era carried over after decolonization.

neoliberalism: the IMF and WTO pushed world economies away from protectionism and towards a liberalization of monetary policy, so that in theory, capitalists anywhere in the world could invest anywhere else in the world. The concept of a “free market” was pure mythology, though, as large investments in poorer countries tended to have monopolistic characteristics, and powerful countries could wreck the currencies of less powerful countries. Furthermore, investments in formerly colonized countries tended to achieve profit in a purely speculative, financial way, and/or by reinforcing single export/extractivist/plantation economies.

democracy and human rights: the US pushed for universal democracy and guaranteed human rights. However, these proved the most imperfect of all the organizing principles. Investors often found it more expedient to work with dictatorships, especially when their goal was quick profit or the construction of highly destructive megaprojects. And the US, British, French, Dutch, and Belgian political elite were too jealous of their hold on power to countenance free elections if it meant a government gained power that was less docile or didn’t give favoritism to the right investors. As such, these NATO states in particular engaged in coups and supported dictatorships across the world, respectively in “America’s backyard” or in former colonies across Africa and Asia. As for human rights, it has proven to be a largely meaningless concept in hierarchical societies that produce vast inequality.

I would love to see a better analysis, but I believe the organizing principles being promoted by China can be summarized as the following.

state sovereignty: though China engages in a great deal of ethnic cleansing and should be qualified as a settler state in at least half its claimed territory, and Xi himself could accurately be described as a very nationalist socialist, China does not place emphasis on the nation-state, per se, as an organizing principle globally. The far more important principle is state sovereignty: within its borders, a state has the legitimacy to do whatever it wants. It can impose ethnic homogeneity to constitute itself as a nation, it can do away with ideas of nation entirely. It isn’t anyone else’s business. Presumably, disagreement around existing borders between sovereign states should be settled through bilateral diplomacy. Also presumably, as their military power grows, the Chinese ruling class will support coups and regime change in weaker countries throughout Asia, Oceania, Latin America, and Africa, but they will need to find an effective way of governing or justifying these exceptional actions.

infrastructural investment: China will continue to support the global discourse of free trade, walking the usual balance between giving strategic support to important domestic companies and ensuring the possibility for governments to attract investment from anywhere in the world, the right of investors to invest anywhere in the world. But unlike a focus on pure profit, as under the US system, there may be a real shift towards promoting sustained economic growth, initially achieved through major infrastructural “improvement” in post-colonial countries. In other words, China—and India, and Brazil—will likely seek to achieve an expansion in real production, not just domestically, but around the world.

quality of life: given their technocratic background, the Chinese ruling class is likely to favor an emphasis on quality of life over one on human rights. Quality of life, according to the capitalist religion, is something that can be measured quantitatively, unlike human rights. And promoting (this view of) quality of life dovetails with increased investment in advancing infrastructure, whereas the figure of human rights encourages violations of other states’ sovereignty. Human rights is a holdover from the paternalism of colonial, Christian countries who need to make sure colonized people have learned how to recite the proper dogmas before they can be trusted with independence. Quality of life, however, can be a point of common ground between diplomats working for a political order based on absolute state sovereignty, and technocrats and investors working to achieve economic growth through infrastructural investment. Promising a higher quality of life can also be an effective strategy for pacifying potentially threatening popular movements.

Both the paradigm and the resources that BRICS has to offer are proving attractive. Just this year, Iran was one of multiple new countries to join BRICS, flaunting US attempts to isolate Tehran.

What would the tipping point look like, heralding the beginning of a new world system?

BRICS wouldn’t necessarily be the vehicle for the new world system, especially since it was designed as an economic and political counterweight within the current world system. But similar to the relation between the League of Nations and the United Nations, it gives a good indication of what the new system would look like.

It could easily kick off as an alliance or treaty after a global recession and the spread of one or two regional wars. The treaty or alliance would include language around a respect for borders and the internal sovereignty of states, and a commitment to mediation instead of warfare. It could be cast as a win-win (rather than the negative sum game of open war) if it were the expansion of an already existing, successful alliance between economic powerhouses. This alliance would open an invitation to all other countries, requiring a recommitment to free trade while announcing major investments as an incentive. Rather than the predatory lending of the IMF, this investment would be putatively designed to modernize infrastructure around the world and increase quality of life.

Original signatories to this alliance would probably have to include China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Egypt, maybe Argentina and Saudi Arabia, and—critically—the European Union, or at least Germany and France. As noted, the EU has already begun distancing itself from the US and keeping the doors open for good relations with China.

An important change that might tilt the scales could be the US defaulting on its debt in a future recession, or any continuation of unhinged US military aggression around the world, without a matching commitment to its historical allies.

The new alliance would begin among a self-selecting group of countries, but it would open itself up globally and quickly eclipse the UN and IMF in legitimacy, functionality, and resources.

What early tensions would such a world system face? Not that the Paris Agreement or UN are having any effect on mitigating planetary disaster, but the BRICS emphasis on using “sovereign resources” (fossil fuels) to fund development and pay for an energy transition directly block any real alternatives for the planet. This means accelerated and catastrophic climate change would be the backdrop of the new world system. Weather changes are proving most catastrophic for middle latitude countries, but these are the very countries that have to pull the weight of inaugurating a new world system.

Chinese and Indian investment in Africa would likely retain an overtly colonial character (moreso, for example, than Brazilian investment in Latin America), preventing the new system from benefiting from a change in branding or an increased legitimacy.

Power struggles among the most powerful members of the alliance could prove destabilizing, especially as India (a rightwing democracy) overtakes China in economic growth. As the resistance movement in Hong Kong demonstrated, China, as an autocracy, has fewer options for incorporating rebellion. If they could not repress a subversive movement with police force, CCP leadership might split and the system would crack.

Also, dictatorial power arrangements rarely survive strong leaders. Granted, Xi is not a dictator in the way that Hitler and Franco were. There is a very strong party apparatus behind him and he has consolidated his power in the Party over the last decade.

India will not fall apart after Modi. but Russia could easily fall apart after Putin. With China, it’s hard to say, because earlier administrations of the CCP lacked Xi’s political acumen, his ability to make aggressive calculations that hone in on how the Chinese state could increase its power without accepting any of the options on the table (e.g. neither Maoism nor a new Open Door Policy).

In other words, Xi and his advisers can think in a new paradigm, a quality necessary for being able to design a new world system. But part of Xi’s system of governance has required an intolerance for any disobedience or dissent, which will make an effective succession much more difficult when Xi is gone. The critical question is, does robust debate happen in secret at the upper and intermediate levels of the CCP, with a projection of consensus and unity in public? Or does Xi’s governing method breed a culture of acquiescent bureaucrats who cannot challenge a bad idea? If the latter, China might be able to help launch a new world system while Xi is in charge, but they might not remain the dominant member of the system’s central alliance.

Talking about a revolution

Honestly, the only reason I gave a bump to the probability of a successful global revolution is because global power systems are facing more friction and becoming unable to project stability. Not because we’re getting stronger.

And the main reasons we are not getting stronger under our own steam is because we have lost memory and imagination.

We rarely know how to achieve any continuity from one generation to the next within the alienation and scarcity of capitalism, so we commit the same mistakes again and again. And under the colonial spirituality of rationalism we have forgotten that the real world cannot exist without imaginary worlds. We let capitalism do all our imagining for us until our imaginations become atrophied, so we can no longer turn to revolution as a meaningful concept because barely anyone knows how to imagine a revolution anymore.

Once we get through the early moments of revolution in which we can carry ourselves solely on passion, spontaneous intelligence, and our own tactical innovation, we have not imagined what steps to take next. So, we do not take them. We either become passive, or exhausted, or we try repeating the exact same dance moves that brought us to that place. Or we try an opposite set of dance moves (which usually bring us to a much worse place).

This is unfortunate because we have the most latitude to build a revolution in a moment like this, when one world system is falling apart, and before it rejuvenates itself or before the next system has the chance to fully animate the replacement.

To not squander our chances, though, we need to remember a great many things:

• Democracy is our enemy. Supporting democracy only turns us into innovative designers for the rejuvenation of the American project.
• The Right and the Left are the two hands of the State, equally dangerous. The real line of conflict runs between above and below. However, Right and Left are not the same. The followers of the Left are mostly sincere. We need to be present to them to help spread meaningful forms of revolt, and we need to show them the true nature of their leaders. As for the Right, we must always attack its lies and paranoias. The key is to leave the door open for followers of the Right to betray authority, but never accommodating their anxieties. We need to build power based on expansive solidarity to show them what that could look like, but they need to take the step of abandoning identities based on oppression.
• Marxism betrayed the strongest revolutionary movements of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. It does not deserve any more chances. Vanguards, authoritarian parties, and reforms betrayed the strongest social movements of the last 100 years. They do not deserve any more chances.
• Abolition already happened, but because it was partial, it only changed the institutions of oppression without ending oppression itself. Meaningful abolition needs to identify the shared root of exploitation and white supremacy (many of today’s abolitionists are already preparing the groundwork for a second major defeat-in-victory).
• Decolonization already happened. But because it was political, it only spread the colony, training the colonized to act like their colonizers. To destroy colonialism, its beginning points and the vehicles for its adaptation need to be destroyed.
• A revolution needs to enact solidarity between all people, but people need to be honest about where they are coming from. People who bear a middle class culture need to unlearn it, as it manifests in a politics of comfort: building informal social power, flattening contradictions, and avoiding conflict. Currently, its crusade is to destroy practices of transformative justice—and the difficult experiences those practices come from—in favor of the kind of attitudes (simultaneously fragile and vicious) that flourish on social media.
• Revolution is a question of organization, but nearly everyone who poses it this way is already limiting themselves to a counterrevolutionary idea of organization.
• There is another way of organizing ourselves, of making plans, of taking strategic steps. And there always has been.

I’ve been trying to develop these arguments in my writing, and it is a major focus of my forthcoming projects. But if you have a specific question, want me to elaborate on something, drop a comment, and I’ll respond if I’m able.

https://petergelderloos.substack.com

Additionally, something I’m less able to contribute to: Black and Indigenous anarchisms need more space and more support. To be truly successful, any revolutionary approach needs to be multiple, it needs to be anticolonial, and it needs to understand the origins of oppression. The specific historical lineage of anarchism that was born in Europe is not sufficient, not for those of us trapped within whiteness and certainly not for everybody else.

For more on these directions, check out Klee Benally’s No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred

Modibo Kadalie, Intimate Direct Democracy

Zoe Samudzi and William C. Anderson, As Black As Resistance

and William C. Anderson, The Nation on No Map

Finally, here is a thought-provoking article about solidarity with both the Kurds and the Palestinians—two peoples facing genocide—and a call for internationalism from below rather than an internationalism that privileges state actors.

Ozlem Goner, “Internationalism beyond the Geopolitics of States and Solidarity in ‘Complex’ Situations”

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https://petergelderloos.substack.com/p/geopolitics-for-2024

Surviving Leviathan with Peter Gelderloos is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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I think we can simplify these questions in a way that may provide some perspective.

Which future would you rather face?

Having to spend between one and ten years in prison

OR

not going to prison, but living in a world in which:

• you and most people you know will, by the age of 50, probably get cancer, heart disease, diabetes, an auto-immune disorder, or a painful chronic illness that no one understands (with all the suffering and likelihood of death that accompany those conditions)
• you, your immediate family, and your closest friends will have a roughly 10% – 50% chance of experiencing a high death toll extreme weather event or acute famine, and possibly dying in it
• if you have family and loved ones from outside Europe/Australia and North America, they will probably face a 50-99% chance of having to face lethal weather events and famines multiple times, killing many of them
• any natural area that you have ever loved will be forever altered by mass extinction, mining, drought, or other causes
• you would have to sit by and watch as the political institutions, financial institutions, and corporations most responsible for all this suffering gain ever more power over your life and your surroundings, never being abolished, never being held accountable in any meaningful way.

Now let’s assume that the bad things described above—relating to death, disease, extreme weather, mass extinctions—are going to happen no matter what. In fact, yes: let’s assume that. We’re not speaking hypothetically right now. This is a realistic assumption. All the scientific models that have been validated and refined over the last decades predict that we are on a collision course for that level of suffering and death, or worse. In the parts of the world that are on the cutting edge of the apocalypse, those conditions already pertain.

So now let’s come back to our hypothetical scenario. First, the scenario’s realistic foundation:

Every year for the foreseeable future brings with it the grim certainty of skyrocketing death rates, disease, famine, mass extinction, loss of habitat, and the disappearance of entire ecosystems.

Now, the choice. Would you rather:

• face all this harm and suffering, within the approximate probabilities named in the first bulleted section, but also
• take illegal actions against the structures and institutions responsible for all this suffering, and by doing so assume a less than 50% risk of one to ten years in prison
• know that with all the other people also taking forceful action, ecocide and genocide become less profitable, and those in power lose some or all their power, whereas the rest of us, as well as the generations to come, gain a partial or complete ability to organize our communities and tend to our ecosystems in a way that prioritizes healing

OR

take no action other than symbolic protest, avoid the risk of prison, but also do nothing to diminish the power of the world eaters. With nothing to hold them back, the apocalypse becomes even more brutal, and the future you face includes:

• hundreds of millions of humans dying every year from famine, lack of clean water, pollution, extreme weather events, and genocidal warfare resulting from these scarcities occurring within a competitive politico-economical framework
• you and everyone you know facing a significant decrease in life expectancy, as the entire human population decreases between 10%-80%
• the likelihood that you and the people you care about the most have to survive or are excruciatingly killed off by famine, cancer, diarrhea, tropical diseases, heart disease, untreated infection, wildfires, floods, or warfare
• having to obey the increasingly dictatorial authority of the political and economic institutions that are directly responsible for all this suffering, or even worse dictatorships that arise as society falls apart but people just watch it all passively

In the above scenarios, which offer simplified but accurate versions of the hidden choices we all face every day, what does the risk of prison have to do with the apocalypse and how extreme it gets?

Actually, everything. To understand why, there’s some official history that needs to be refuted.

When we learn the standard history of civilization, revolutions are never mentioned until the Age of Reason and the supposedly reasonable revolutions of slave owners, colonizers, military officers, and businessmen in France and North America. Prior to that, we may hear of quite a few earlier civilizations that mysteriously collapsed. Or, we may get spoon fed a tale of continuity from Mesopotamia through Egypt to Rome and the Holy Roman Empire and Spain and then modernity, with everything beyond the shadow of the State (or in the latter version, beyond the shadow of so-called Western states) completely ignored.

In the years I was doing the research for my book, Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation, I could not find a single example of a statist society that collapsed, that just fell apart from some logistical inefficiency, spiraling warfare, or local ecocide perpetrated by the ruling class. I did come across multiple “mysterious” collapses that were quite clearly caused or at least helped along by lower class revolutions, and after these revolutions people’s quality of life usually improved. As for the other collapses that do remain mysterious, in every case I came across evidence—inconclusive but nonetheless strong—that popular uprisings combined with massive abandonment (back in the day when there was a frontier beyond which State power did not reach) helped tip the balance of power. Yet the vast majority of academic sources I plowed through—historians, archaeologists, paleoecologists, and anthropologists from fifty different decades, twenty different countries, and a dozen different schools of thought—refused to even mention the concept of revolution or to portray the lower classes as a group capable of agency or even thought.

So: revolution. It’s been with us as a possibility as long as the State has. Accordingly, in our present scenario, I am talking about us rising up against the power structures responsible for ecocide and genocide, and taking effective action against the institutions and infrastructures that cause us the most harm.

The question of the law, obviously, is a joke. The law is a weapon in the hands of the ruling class. They only follow it or deploy it when it suits their interests. And if we take effective action against them, they will try to punish us regardless of whether our actions are technically illegal.

So I’m not strictly talking about taking illegal action: I’m talking about saving ourselves from immense harm, which most people would consider an ethically valid basis for action.

For now, let’s leave aside the ethical question of, how many people complicit in mass murder is it okay to kill, provided they are still engaged in mass murder and we’re not punishing them for harms that are no longer ongoing. (I might pick that question up in a future newsletter.)

At the moment let’s just imagine the destruction of things that have no feelings and no existence outside of their status as tools for extraction, domination, and despoliation: pipelines, mines, highways, airports, prisons, mansions, drilling installations, facilities related to the police and military, cash crop and monocrop operations, golf courses, grass lawns, cell phone towers, useless-shit factories, chemical and automobile and weapons manufacturers… the list goes on and on.

We know from past experiences that sabotage campaigns are exponentially more likely than protest to lead to the cancellation of new oppressive infrastructures being built. Sabotage campaigns together with protests are even more effective, especially if those protests focus on blockades and the total rejection of those in power rather than the overtures to dialogue. Regardless, protests, blockades, and sabotage all put us at risk of arrest and imprisonment.

About that risk though. I tossed out the figure of a 50% chance of going to prison. That was intentional, because I think if we are going to take big risks for a revolution, it is much healthier and more sustainable if we face up to those risks and assume the worst will come to pass. If we can imagine ourselves dealing with the consequences and surviving, prison and the police will already have lost most of their power over us. But realistically, the actual risk is closer to, and probably below, 1%, if we follow some basic security practices. Significantly, the actions that may feel the safest if we are inculcated in all the delusions of a liberal democracy, are actually the riskiest.

This has certainly been true for me. In my life, I have been arrested four times. Those four arrests earned me (in order)

• six months locked up in county jails, maximum security prison, and minimum security prison, where I faced various forms of violence from guards and snitches;
• a weekend in a temporary detention facility in conditions that technically qualified as toxic;
• a week in jail, a deportation process lasting two years in which I had to remain in the country and check in at court every two weeks but was not legally allowed to work, and the whole time I was under the threat of a permanent ban, which would mean never being allowed to return and see loved ones;
• and a quick night in jail, respectively.

The first three arrests—the ones with the worst consequences—were for some of the most peaceful actions I have ever participated in. The first was civil disobedience, the second was a legal protest (in fact it was the mass arrest that was illegal, and if I’d had the patience to follow up with some noncommunicative lawyers I would have gotten a huge payout a few years later, in part for the illegal arrest and in part for the toxic site where the holding pens had been set up). And the third was also a legal protest, though it took two years on provisional release and a court case to prove it (there was, um… some disagreement about what constituted “public disorder” and what constituted an “explosive” in the eyes of the law, and it took a good lawyer and favorable witnesses to win that dispute).

The fourth one actually was an illegal protest in which a number of neo-Nazis and cops got assaulted and even injured, and some property got smashed. My friend and I weren’t assuming any additional risks aside from going with the flow, but going with the flow is its own risk, and we didn’t hightail it out of there fast enough when the signs made it clear that that was the move. However, police couldn’t pin anything on any of the people who got cornered and mass arrested. It was too difficult for them to gather specific evidence, because of the chaos factor, because people weren’t civil, because of all the movement and pandemonium plus a modest amount of destruction. Of course, police don’t needevidence to lock people up in prison, but in a democracy they do need to calculate how much they can stray into the legal terrain of the state of exception. In this case, it would have been harder for the pigs to sell since there wasn’t enough disruption for the media to create a major political scandal or mobilize fragile bourgeois sensibilities enough to justify locking up anyone who had anything to do with the protest. So they let us all go.

Now let’s talk about all the things that aren’t showing up here, all the risks that never resulted in arrests. Or, more appropriately, let’s talk around them. There is an unavoidable inequality between civil disobedience, on the one hand, and on the other the continuum of sabotage, collective self-defense, counterattack, and insurrectionary action. The State will go to far greater lengths to repress or eliminate those they suspect of carrying out forceful actions, and also those who vocalize their support for such actions and the revolutionary culture they belong to.

What’s more, the State proactively organizes society to preempt the capacities we need in order to struggle wisely, like the ability to tell stories and create collective memory. We are shaped as isolated individuals dependent on the dominant institutions for any sense of history. More often than not, they just spoon feed us entertainment to fill the hole where our sense of history should be. And as we know, repression skews sharply in favor of nonviolence: it is far riskier to tell the stories of sabotage, of insurrection, of combat. I won’t be sharing any such stories in this newsletter. Immediately, I can hear in my own head the cynical insinuation that I’m probably just some hypocrite who only writes about this stuff. Which is okay. We need to learn to deal with far worse forms of baiting and harassment.

The most important thing is on the one hand not to respond from a place of ego, not to worry about curating a reputation for being a daring revolutionary, and on the other hand to pay close attention to anyone who mocks or belittles others in a way that would encourage a culture of people having to show off or insinuate their illegalist credentials. And always remember the maxim: you don’t have to be a cop to do a cop’s work. (Don’t spread rumors about people you suspect of being infiltrators or snitches: the cops themselves benefit from rumorology and often spread false accusations against others; instead, share constructive criticism of harmful forms of communication and conflict/avoidance.)

Stepping back from our individual egos and sinking into our collective body, what any one of us can attest to is that there have been tens of thousands of banks and cop shops smashed or burned, pigs and fascists beaten up, government buildings attacked, pipelines and mines sabotaged, construction and clearcutting equipment destroyed, research facilities torched, labs liberated, secrets leaked, useful or valuable goods stolen, and frauds committed, and those who have done prison sentences can best be counted in the hundreds,1 with many of those being people who got framed but didn’t actually do anything.

In other words, we are often the safest when we play it dangerous, as long as we are careful, as long as we use precautions or make smart interventions during chaotic moments, as long as we discourage a culture of bravado, self-isolation, rumor-spreading, or snitching.

And to zoom out for a moment, no one on this planet is safe until we can nourish an ethos of collective self-defense against the institutions that are threatening and harming us, smashing their gears so they cannot function anymore. What use is it to speak of survival if we have no practice of fighting back against those who are killing us? There is room for all of us, but we need to figure out what we can contribute and what it is we still need to learn in order to be a vital part of the webs of solidarity and mutual aid.

Thanks for reading Surviving Leviathan with Peter Gelderloos! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

A revolution is not comprised of tactics alone. If we let ourselves get turned around by impatience, desperation, avoidance of criticism, loss of historical memory, if we divorce our strategies from our goals, our visions, and our ethics, we quickly become our own worst enemies. Nonetheless, it doesn’t hurt to proliferate certain tactics, to imagine what a better place we would be in if people realized it’s well worth the risk to attack the infrastructures that are spewing out death, poisoning our futures and our present. What a better place we would be in if people responded to our learned helplessness, to this hegemonic hopelessness, with a thought, a certainty: how many miles there are of unprotected power grids and pipelines! How many bulldozers, construction sites, and offices of evil institutions have no more protection at night than a camera that will log nothing more than a time and a masked figure, unidentifiable! How many of us there are, and how hard we are to surveil when we leave our snitches at home, when we don’t take our phones and other tracking devices out of the house with us!

How powerful, when we realize that we are powerful. How frightful, when we remember that we can be vengeful. How grounded, when we learn to integrate our need to fight and to heal. How inspiring, when we understand that all the walls and cages and cameras and militarized police forces of this whole prison society are there to protect the powerful… from us.

Sooner or later, the odds will flip, and our probabilities for health and survival will begin a slow ascent, and the odds on the plutocrats and police will face a sudden plummet. That moment? Collectively, we decide when it arrives.

1

The approximation—tens of thousands of actions, hundreds of imprisoned—is based on, roughly, the last ten years in the half dozen countries I’m most familiar with.

_____

SOURCE: https://petergelderloos.substack.com/p/ethics-risk-apocalypse

The post Ethics, Risk, Apocalypse- Peter Gelderloos appeared first on Void Network.

PART 1:

Disasters and the Dispossessed: Securitization, moralisation and criminalisation

This year, my latest book was published by Pluto Press: Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action. It took me 7 years to write, and it’s a tome, so my hope in this article is to give a whistlestop summary in two instalments. Any interested readers can purchase the book at a discount from the publisher, and there is also an open access version available free online.[1]

Climate change means the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is increasing, while increasing global interconnectedness and the destruction of ecosystems mean that pandemics are set to become an ongoing feature in the story of humanity. The decline and collapse of the oil economy, industrial civilisation and associated structures of governance take shape in neoliberalism and the decline of comprehensive welfare states and healthcare. We can no longer rely on our governments to support us – if we ever could anyway. This was never a surety for the most precarious, marginalised and mobile humans.

Climate change and pandemics unequally impact on the least well-off. Disasters have never been a wholly ‘natural’ phenomenon, since settlements built in the most risk-prone areas have tended to be populated by the poor, while the rich can afford to be more selective in where they build and live, to move more easily if needed, and to insure their livelihoods and lifestyles. Government policies & mainstream media discourse also unequally impact the least well-off. During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown was moralised in media and mainstream discourse through catchy slogans like ‘stay safe, stay home’, ignoring the fact that the homeless, and those subject to domestic abuse, don’t have ‘safe homes’ to go to. Disaster response is often securitised and militarised in racist ways, for example after Hurricane Katrina in the USA in 2005, Black communities were subject to the most repressive policing, while media repeated tropes of white people ‘finding’ food for their families with Black people portrayed as ‘looting’ in captions under photos of almost identical scenes (save for the colour of the protagonists’ skins).[2]

The story is not all doom and gloom. Decentralised, anarchist-inspired mutual-aid disaster relief efforts have arisen after nearly every major natural disaster in the United States since Katrina.Occupy Sandy grew out of Occupy Wall Street to mobilise relief for Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and was widely acknowledged to have organised relief more effectively than federal agencies or NGOs. There was Direct-Action Bike Squad, which organised a bike team to Puerto Rico to deliver supplies to the mountainous regions after Hurricane Maria in 2017. Several anarchist and autonomous groups arose in response to Hurricanes Florence and Michael in 2018, and in the same year several self-organised neighbourhood groups emerged and organised relief alongside leftist groups including Food Not Bombs and the Houston Anarchist Black Cross after Hurricane Harvey. In late 2017, activists involved in some of these groups set up the grassroots direct-action network Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, with a stable online presence, which provides training materials and workshops for activists and communities throughout the US on organizing disaster relief based on anarchist ethics and organizing principles. Anarchist-inspired, autonomous and non-hierarchical movements have also mobilised disaster relief efforts in other countries, for example the self-managed autonomous brigades in Mexico after 2017 earthquakes, a grassroots village solidarity network in Indonesia after the 2004 tsunamis, anarchist responses to Typhoon Yolanda in the Phillippines in 2013, and self-management and direct action against the militarization of disaster zones after earthquakes in Italy in 2012 and 2009. Decentralised mass movement for disaster relief is new to the UK, which has historically been spared from major ‘natural disasters’, but the nationwide visibility of ‘mutual aid’ in the wake of COVID-19 was unparalleled, and the term ‘mutual aid’ – originally an anarchist term popularised by Kropotkin – entered everyday parlance and mainstream media (it was even used in Conservative government reports).

This echoes back to the 1940s-50s, when the terminology ‘post-disaster utopia’ was used by conservatives to describe a period where people would put aside differences and ‘roll up their sleeves’ to selflessly help others during War efforts and disaster recovery. This ethos continues to the present day in the aftermath of hurricanes and pandemics, as governments laud community action to justify neoliberal rollback of welfare. During the Covid-19 crisis, we witnessed the irony of ‘mutual aid’ being mobilised by the neoliberal state in support of a rapid return to the capitalist ‘new normal’.

My book argues that despite these attempted co-optations, mutual aid and other disaster utopias prefigure values beyond the crises of capitalism. Disaster utopias problematise the orientation of utopia towards intention and the future. Nobody wishes for a disaster, yet they produce affects such as desire and hope for change, and facilitate (through necessity) the formation of grassroots infrastructures and technologies.

However, the government and others (particularly the moralising discourse of the social democratic left and the NGO-complex) try to co-opt and de-radicalise them. There is a whole discourse, originally academic, but seeping into mainstream media and frequently adopted by NGO professionals, of ‘social capital’. Social action, rather than being seen as somethingvaluable on its own terms, is re-cast as a form of ‘capital’ to be mobilised in the interest ofa return to the‘normality’, or the even more terrifying ‘new normal’ – of capitalism-as-usual. Social capital theory emphasizes how local-level participation is vital in building ‘resilience’ and that top-down processes fail in emergencies because not responsive and flexible enough. It soundsradical and progressive because it valorises the grassroots, but the grassroots is not valued on its own terms but in terms of the value it has for capitalism/capitalists (ultimately – profit). This discourse encourages NGOs and grassroots to absorb former state functions, with the expectation of co-operation with the state (e.g. funding with conditions attached). The role of state is technocratic; to impose cohesion.

When society and the state are seen as complementary and mutually supporting, this means that only the sections of ‘civil society’ that are legible to the state and which it can capitalise upon and control are seen as ‘social capital’. Other social forces are a threat to be controlled, securitized and criminalized – through recuperation or repression. This often causes splits within movements – for example during COVID-19 there were calls from middle class and liberal-centrist participants ‘not to politicise mutual aid’, refusing to acknowledge their own politics, and the anarchist history of mutual aid.

Two concepts that feature heavily in my book are repression and co-optation. Repression refers to the action of subduing someone or something by force. Co-optation means subsuming outsiders into the elite/mainstream in order to manage opposition and maintain stability (synonymous with ‘recuperation’). In my book, thorough analysis of government policies after Occupy Sandy and COVID-19, I show how the co-optation and de-politicisation of mutual aid movements – into merely ‘helping’ movements that keep the wheels of capitalism rolling after a disaster – was purposeful. The political consensus that future pandemics will be dealt with through top-down restrictions and authoritarian measures rather than redistribution and community-based alternatives remains unchallenged. The economic projections are similarly dire: rising energy and living costs, resource wars, and millions dispossessed and excluded from the securities required for the ‘good life’.

Does this mean, therefore, that mutual aid movements are doomed to failure? I will explore this more in Part 2.

Part 2:

Disaster Anarchy

In the previous instalment (DOPE 21, Spring2023), I explored how disasters under capitalism have greater impact upon the poorest and most marginalised members of society. Risks and hazards not only impact unequally on precarious members of society, but they also magnify inequalities and dispossess more people. Anarchist forms of organising have typically played an important role in disaster relief, yet they are often either repressed or co-opted by state-centred approaches.Do anarchist approaches have anything to offer beyond merely state-friendly’social capital,mopping up the failures of the austere neoliberal state? In this instalment, I look at some assumptions underlying state-centred approaches, and how anarchist approaches can resist and transgressthese.

Mainstream disaster management paradigms, as well as many socialist and Marxist positions, believe the state has an essential role to play in managing and redistributing risk and resources. The main objection to the idea of mutual aid as an effective form of disaster relief is that humans in a state of anarchy cannot organise themselves effectively to deal with global issues like climate change, nor social issues like public health. This view has been put forward by political commentator George Monbiot, who has become emblematic of the environmental left, as well as Marxist academic David Harvey, and is a trope frequently repeated in left-wing and liberal media. This position led to near consensus with right-wing media during the Covid-19 pandemic that authoritarian measures like police-enforced lockdowns were the only way to deal with the pandemic, which were prioritised over community-based and resourcing measures (such as personal protective equipment;widespread, rapid, no-questions testing; community engagement and education; financial support for isolation).

Anarchists disagree. Anarchist ideas and practices, such as prefiguration and mutual aid, show that downscaling and localisation are often effective responses to structural asymmetries. For example, mutual aid – the practice of helping one’s neighbours in a disaster, when systems of support provided by state and capitalism break down – does not aim to just put a sticking plaster over the gaps where the status quo fails, but rather to show that ‘another world is possible – a more caring society where people treat one another as equals, who are deserving of mutual aid. Charity assumes a giver and a taker, and a formalised organisation that regulates the relations between them. Mutual aid assumes that anyone can potentially be in need of help, but may also have much to give.

Mutual aid is a form of disaster response that starts from the experiences and impacts on humans and other living beings and the meaningful structures of life embedded in objects, habitats, and ecosystems, rather than focusing on keeping order by managing the effects on the state or economic system, treating humans as generic subjects. It starts from the position of each person/being. Rather than a top-down approach that creates roles people must fill, a bottom-up response would facilitate people to contribute and plug-in’ to a network based on their own talents, needs and desires. Rather than centralised efforts under a lead organisation, this approach would encourage multiple small groups, and a proliferation of projects with different emphases and methods – allowing some overlap and redundancy.

A truly mutual aid effort should avoid securitisation and moral panics around empathic and humanitarian approaches (e.g. don’t shame or arrest people breaking lockdown rules; or for failing to do their recycling). This does not preclude communities from instituting rules or protection measures but these should be democratic and decided by consensus, rather than imposed from the top down. Emphasis should be on resourcing, like medical equipment, community education and pedagogy, and support for people in need, rather than on order, securitisation, and criminalisation.

The form of organisation might be imagined as a proliferation of diverse small-scale alternatives- housing and worker co-operatives, community and permaculture gardens, localised food and energy production – engaging in various overlapping solidarities and mutual aid. This would require degrowth (a shift away from the relentless pursuit of economic growth and consumer accumulation) and, therefore, a wholesale change in societal values – escaping the ‘rat race of production and consumption.

Anarchism reimagines the temporality and scale of radical social change. There is an emphasis on the small scale, on degrowth and social recomposition, on a society bubbling with transgressive life through overlapping societies, groups, and organisations whose affinities and relations are immeasurable and un-mappable. Social change is both immanent and prefigurative, and does not require scaling-up through unity or a vanguard in order to be extended or politicised; such vanguardism tends to defer lived anarchy to the future. Transgression and insurrection are already a part of everyday life and are observable everywhere when everyday life is examined using an anarchist epistemology.

People like Monbiot and Harvey argue that the problem with anarchism is that it can’t be scaled-up to provide an effective response to large-scale ‘wicked’ problems like pandemics, climate change, and capitalist extractivism; however, degrowth and re-scaling is often an effective response. The powerful only accept solutions that leave their own position untouched, which effectively prevents degrowth: the state seeks to capitalise on all social relations. The anarchist reversal of perspective views humans’ greatest enemy as the state – a particular way of relating – rather than as other human beings in themselves. Mutual aid is therefore always vulnerable to co-optation by controlling ways of being.

In my research, observation and interviews with Occupy Sandy, New York, and groups organising mutual aid during Covid-19 in London, I found that having a shared space, such as a squat, occupation or a social centre, was associated with groups who managed to ward off state power. Radical interviewees tended to favour accounts of mutual aid as a form of direct action that prefigures a stateless society and as raising awareness of structural conditions.Some argued that this meant that the helping aspects of mutual aid (social reproduction) should be linked to more radical actions, such as occupations, eviction resistance, community self-defence, protests, and being explicit and vocal about radical politics.

It is important not to underplay the very real divisions in movements between these more radical perspectives and those who wished to keep ‘politics separate from mutual aid, nor to suggest these are two mutually exclusive camps. In the book I argue that the (liberal) discourse of ‘apolitical’ mutual aid is not possible. Seemingly ‘apolitical perspectives serve to reinforce the status quo and co-opt mutual aid into securitised and co-opted versions with their racialised constitutive exclusions. For example, some Covid-19’mutual aid’ groups became more like neighbourhood watch groups, with an interviewee giving the example of having to talk a liberal group member out of calling the police on a group of young Black men for breaking lockdown rules.

Nevertheless, this urge to keep mutual aid radical is complicated by the fact that marginalised communities may already partake in their own forms of mutual aid, even if they don’t call it that, nor call themselves anarchists. In such cases, the perceived fetishizing of political slogans or words, or of”politics’ as sectarian identities, can seem colonising and alienating, and get in the way of mutual aid. Even where explicit politics is avoided, mutual aid may have political effects through social recomposition, creating infrastructures, through prefiguring a more equal and stateless society and gift economies, through structural critique and consciousness-raising, and through direct action.

[1]Available from the publisher with 30% discount using code: FIRTH30 at https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745340463/disaster-anarchy/ Also available for free, open access at: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/57974

[2]https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hurricane-katrina-looters/

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Humans are an extraordinary result of evolution. It is a great power to be the most highly evolved creature in our conceivable knowledge and, in that, each one of us has a great responsibility. Problem solving is something that all humans do intuitively every day. It matters not what class, race, age, educational level; every single person can and does solve problems every day. The size, form and manifestations of those problems vary greatly but there is one major problem that transcends the rest and affects every single one of us. That problem is capitalism. This form of free-trade economics based on infinite growth models has proven to be unsustainable. A modern-day solution to the problems posed on the Earth and faced by all animals, human and otherwise, due to human activities can be found in the United Nation’s (2015) 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. There has also existed since as early as the 19th century a political philosophy that can provide a social, political, and economic framework to accompany the well-defined scientific solutions to our environmental issues. Anarchism, as a political philosophy, realizes that society is entirely able to govern itself (Miller, 2003, 3) and was originally introduced as a critique to industrial capitalism (Proudhon, 1893, 48). It is not within the realm of this essay to defend anarchism against the negative portrayal it has received*. Instead, Proudhon’s political anarchism will be used to accompany the UN’s Sustainable Development as a social, political, and economic framework for a sustainable planet.

Goal 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals calls for “peace, justice, and strong institutions”. Evidently, these virtues are something the global community seemingly lacks. Conventional anarchism focuses on individual and societal cooperation and cohesion and “urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition” (Goldman, 1921, 22-23). Instilling Proudhon’s anarchic political philosophy, ideologies, and practices will make achieving this goal more realistic because it has been developed through inductive reasoning (Proudhon, 1893). As seen on the “Scale of Knowledge” from Dr. Floris van den Berg, the same highly certain method of acquiring knowledge is also used in the natural sciences, such as physics and chemistry (van den Berg, 2012). In this sense, anarchism is something of the science of politics. As our species developed free-will over basic survival instincts, people were the first animals to live outside of natural law. This affords us countless innovations that provide the comfort and safety to question existence. Before science, it was widely believed that we were descendants of divine beings and, given only the condition that we follow a set of rules established by these gods, the Earth and everything on it was infinite and made for us. This anthropocentric perspective instilled with heteronomous ethics is still widely engrained in global society. However, the recognition of anthropogenic environmental impact can be dated back as far as Plato’s Critias dialogues where he unconcernedly notes soil erosion and deforestation due to agricultural advancements (Attfield, 2018, 3). The fatal flaw of humanity is the continuance of anthropocentricism. If one can only view humans as the apex of life for whom the Earth was created, as opposed to one step in evolutionary time, it is not possible to live sustainably. This alongside prescribed heteronomous ethics systematically removes the virtues of self-awareness, self-responsibility, and autonomy necessary to understand that the ecosystem is finite and that perhaps we are not the be-all, end-all of biological evolution.

Anarchism attempts to bring these virtues to the forefront of humanity by calling for the elimination of overruling heteronomous virtues found in the institutions of religion, property, and government (Goldman, 1910; Proudhon, 1892). Following the Green Revolution in the 1950s, which involved using newly developed artificial fertilizers and heavy irrigation techniques to maximize food production, the development of environmental science and concern for the effects of increased large-scale agriculture and industrialization rapidly became more prevalent. With the release of The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962, the non-scientific community was able to read an alluring and beautifully written prose that clearly outlined the spread of pollutants from one side of the world to the other (Attfield, 2018, 3). In 1972, The Limits to Growth was published. Written by an international team of multidisciplinary academics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it evaluated those factors which limit growth of our species could be narrowed into five basics: population growth, nonrenewable resource capacity, industrial and agricultural production rates, and pollution output (Meadows et al, 1972, 11). Clearly, these five indicators hold true today. The Limits to Growth also set out to provide an accessible handbook for how people can “achieve a state of global equilibrium” by limiting ourselves and our production of material goods; thus, we can “live indefinitely” (Meadows et al, 1972). These texts were some of the first initiatives by environmentalists to provide complex information in a concise, accessible manner for the general public. In this sense, the various researchers concerned for the environment aimed to expand the anthropocentrism that dominated to a more “ecocentric” (Attfield, 2018, 12) worldview. While it is a much more distorted and silenced voice, anarchism (Goldman, 1910; Proudhon, 1893) recognized this ecocentric worldview by maintaining the philosophy that Gods and the State are socially constructed authoritative figures that can only exist through the peoples’ submission to the rules outlined by these archetypal figures.

Meanwhile, just around the time The Limits to Growth was published, a new ideology of capitalism had been introduced and rapidly appropriated by governments and industries worldwide. It promoted most notably three assumptions: (1) “commercial value could be maximized by handing management of companies and public policy to exceptionally smart, and highly motivated people”, (2) “commercial value, so maximized, would be a good proxy for social value without government interference”, and (3) “the redistributions of income resulting from this maximization, whether within countries or between them, were not a proper concern for economists” (Collier et al, 2021, 638). These quotations are from Capitalism: what has gone wrong, what needs to be changed, and how it can be fixed, a 2021 article in the Oxford Review of Economic Policies which poses these questions to a selection of leading capitalist economists. Their summation of these assumptions is immediately followed by the statement: “Unfortunately, no part of this new ideology proved to be correct” (Collier et al, 2021, 638). As well, the article states that these 3 main drivers of the newest manifestation of capitalism “resulted in social and political polarizations which have become unsustainable” (Collier et al, 2021, 638). It is clear there is now consensus on all sides that the current dominating economic methodology and resulting society is unsustainable and the result of misinformed, misdirected guidance (Attfield, 2018; Collier et al, 2021; Goldman, 1910; Miller, 2010; Proudhon, 1893; van den Berg, 2012). In this revelation, it gives hope that there are grounds for systemic change.

A common term used to critique globalization and free-market capitalism is ‘neocolonialism’. It describes the phenomenon wherein nations that were previously ravaged due to colonialism are now targeted for extremely valuable resources such as precious metals and oil. In statements such as, “The major untapped pool of cheap young workers for the next few decades is Africa and the region is ripe for conventional capitalism”, also extracted from page 643 of the 2021 Oxford Economic Policy Review article, it is clear we must be vigilant in deciding on a global system that will not lead us back but forward. Global free-market capitalism is seen as a “neo” or new form of colonialization. Another view of this can be found in the article in defense of capitalism in the distinction between “winners” and “large groups of uncompensated losers” under the capitalist system (Collier et al, 2021). Aptly so, the result was and is “disaffection and political activism with unpredictable repercussions” (Collier et al, 2021). No deliberation is provided in the article. The only understanding of political activism in this statement is with the vague, negative association of “unpredictable repercussions”. This presents a fallacy of what can come from positive political activism in response to unsatisfactory laws and regulations. One direct example of positive political activism by anarchists is dumpster-diving. Ann Meneley (2018) presents specifically the point of view of Danish dumpster-divers that, “It is perceived as functional, as wasting is seen as stupid”, though this is a view taken by most modern anarchists. Meneley also recognizes the group “Food Not Bombs” which is an international anarchist collective that feeds the impoverished and homeless populations with meals cooked entirely from ‘dumpstered’ food. Dumpster diving is an act of direct rebellion that only exists when a nation lives outside of its means. Educating the Stupid is a concept developed by Dr. van den Berg (2012) which discusses, in part, that the combined ecological footprint of the global population must stay within the Planet’s carrying capacity for our species. The same concept is reverberated through The Limits of Growth report. The seemingly incendiary title of this ethical concept sets to reiterate an ethical standard that has resounded in the speech of many great minds such as Albert Einstein who is famously quoted to have said: “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing”. In the age of knowledge and technology, it is no longer acceptable to feign ignorance of the various consequences of lives based on production, consumption, and infinite growth in a finite ecosystem. At this point, there is only stupidity in those of us who know and do not act.

Aside from the environmental and societal devastation caused by global trade and industry practices, the driving force of capitalism, consumerism, is inherently unsustainable. Though once viewed as a sign of wealth and well-being when a country’s citizens were able to be effective spenders, nowadays, consumerism is being discussed more frequently as a health detriment (Meneley, 2018). On one hand, citizens in impoverished regions, ie. the “losers”, live lives of “involuntary simplicity” (Meneley, 2018). Meanwhile, mental illnesses exhibited in behaviors such as hoarding and physical illnesses such as morbid obesity are rampant in wealthier nations, or the nations of “winners”. Consequently, initiatives encouraging minimalism, or “voluntary simplicity”, immerge in response to these ailments of overconsumption (Meneley, 2018). Capitalism focuses on unbridled maximization of profit through consumer spending, thus requires branding and advertising techniques to promote greater consumption. These tactics often include creating a sense of self for the consumer and encouraging “self-branding”, as the consumer should view themselves as a commodity (Meneley, 2018). Anarchism brings value to individual freedom of expression and calls for the elimination of property (Goldman, 1910; Proudhon, 1893). As expressed so eloquently by Emma Goldman, a distinguished anarchist and feminist pioneer, value is manifested by someone “to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist, — the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force” (Goldman, 1921, 24). In other words, anarchism encourages the individual to find what work they can do that does not ultimately feel like work but feels like the fulfillment of one’s personal values. This recognition of ‘self’ in a career path allows for a level of self-responsibility and social obligation often not afforded by a consumer driven society.

So, while globalized trade ravages the underdeveloped nations, consumerism plagues the rest, and the greatest damage is incurred by the ecosystem and non-human animals. Just as no one would deny the atrocities of imperialism, colonialization, fascism, or any other form of absolute authoritative rule, the vast disparities between the winners and losers under capitalism are well-known. Additionally, the complete devastation of the planet’s biodiversity, natural resources, and the ecosystem is not news. The current world economic system and alleged lack of political interference have failed. The solution needs to be a complete reformation of these elements.

In the conclusion of the Oxford Economic Policy Review, the capitalist economists sum up three underlying issues that are commonly reported on about how “the pathologies of economics have misdirected policies”. They are in short: (1) “…inadequate depiction of the individual in conventional economics as a person preoccupied with consumption and leisure. In contrast, evolutionary biology suggests we are strongly motivated by purposes beyond consumption and leisure with a capacity to be morally load-bearing”, (2) “…widespread support for greater devolution to local decision-taking, and an emphasis on the importance of cooperation in communities. Far from being selfishly individualistic, humans have a strong capacity to cooperate in communities”, and (3) “…the human brain has evolved to be well-suited to decisions under uncertainty, and decisions devolved to teams within which people naturally cooperate enable rapid learning through experimentation and copying”, (Collier at al, 2021, 647). Conventional anarchism has always encompassed these exact ideologies, as it is a century-old political reformative plan developed due to disaffection with the capitalist economic system in an industrializing, globalizing world (Proudhon, 1893). In this, Proudhon’s anarchic political philosophy is the only available, long-standing social-political framework to achieve a sustainable planet.

Lina Miller

*See the following text for additional information on this topic:

Egoumenides, M. (2014). Philosophical Anarchism and Political Obligation. Bloomsbury Academic.

Pritchard, A. (2010). What can the absence of anarchism tell us about the history and purpose of International Relations? Review of International Studies, 37, 1647–1669. doi:10.1017/S0260210510001075

References:

• Attfield, D. (2018). Environmental Ethics. A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press
  Collier, P. et al. (2021). Capitalism: what has gone wrong, what needs to change, and how it can be fixed. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 37 (4), 637–649 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grab035
• Proudhon, J.P. (1893). Property is Theft. In D. Guérin & P. Sharkey (Eds.), No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism (pp. 48-54). AK Press.
• Goldman, E. (1910). Anarchism: What it really stands for. In H. Havel (Eds.), Anarchism and other essays (pp. 21-29). Mother Earth Publishing Association.
• Meadows, D.H. et al. (1972). The Limits to Growth: A report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. Potomac Associates. https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/
• Meneley, A. (2018.) Consumerism. Annual Review of Anthropology 47, 117-132, https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041518
• Miller, D. (2003). Political Philosophy: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• United Nations. (2015). THE 17 GOALS: Sustainable Development. In Sdgs.Un.Org. Retrieved January 4, 2022, from https://sdgs.un.org/goals
• Van den Berg, F. & Meindertsma, J. (2012). Ethics: Philosophy for a Better World. [Poster for PSE2 course]. Geosciences Department. Utrecht University.
• Van den Berg, F. & Meindertsma, J. (2012). Philosophy of Science. [Poster for PSE2 course]. Geosciences Department. Utrecht University.

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1. PRINCE SIDDHARTHA DEFIED HIS FATHER, OLIGARCH ŚUDDHODANA

The Buddha’s life story is very essential to the Buddhist tradition because many of its main concepts are delivered in a parable fashion. As the story goes, the Buddha was born as Siddhartha Gautama, the prince of a regent Kshatriya family. The caste system was ubiquitous in the Buddha’s life. So his father, the Oligarch Śuddhodana, had absolute power over his subjects as an oligarch of the Shakya tribe’s Mahājanapada (oligarchic republic) before it was subjugated into the greater Kosala realm. And people below Śuddhodana were given various tasks suited to their caste. But from one perspective, no person’s life was more under the thumb of Śuddhodana than Siddhartha himself. Before he was born, the Buddha’s coming is said to have been foretold by a yogi named Asita. He told Śuddhodana that his precious son will either become a warrior king, conquering all rival territories by conquest, or a sagely spiritual leader who will influence the world with his wisdom. Being the patriarch that he was, Śuddhodana wished for his son to become a warlord. He cringed at the notion of his son becoming a religious sage. So he did everything in his power to make sure Siddhartha would become a king by conquest. Śuddhodana ordered all of his subjects to create an alternate reality for Siddhartha within the palace so that he would be unwise to the experiences of the outside world and thus unable to become a sage. This parable is so valuable because we can clearly see a crucial trait of authoritarianism laid bare: the need to control and distort knowledge from others. If you find yourself among people who attempt to hide knowledge from you, and whom prevent you from learning, they are either acting out of self-interest, or almost certainly trying to subjugate and oppress you. Śuddhodana forbade Siddhartha from leaving the palace and made it so that his subjects would only teach him things that lead to his success as a conquering king. But eventually Siddhartha disobeyed his father’s commands and left the palace to experience the Four Sights: first, an old man; second, a sick man; third, a corpse; and fourth, an ascetic hermit (yogi). There is an extensive narrative regarding these four sights that I recommend you read, but in summary they symbolize Siddharta’s insights into certain truths: aging is inescapable, we will all succumb to illness, we all die, and these realizations have led many people to seek transcendence from these unfortunate truths. But the main moral of the Four Sights is that we cannot delude ourselves they are not our shared reality no matter how hard we try. This is called impermanence or anicca in Pali.

The Four Sights troubled Siddhartha so much that he could not find peace living a life of luxury in the palace, doing as his father commanded. It is said he felt a personal conviction and call to action that he needed to do something to help people as well as himself. Meanwhile, his father heard of his desertion and resolved even more to ensure Siddhartha remains in the palace. In the end, the Buddha would not be kept from deserting the palace for good. When he reached the outskirts of town, Siddhartha cut his hair and shed his regal garments and jewels and gave them to his charioteer, Channa. In this tale, we can see a clear rejection of several hierarchical and political preconceptions. Despite being the son of the oligarch Śuddhodana, Siddhartha disobeyed his commands. Despite being the autocrat of the Shakya tribe’s domain, regent in Kapilavastu, his decree was not obeyed with unquestioning loyalty. And the fact this story was carried down through oral tradition in the region for hundreds of years before it was written into the Pali canon is indicative of an anti-establishment narrative. The Buddha’s defiance against his oligarch father, Śuddhodana, is in direct contrast with the patriarchal values of hierarchical societies so ubiquitous in the ancient Shakya and Kosala realms of India. Not only was his refusal to obey his father’s commands an affront to oligarchic rule, but it was also a rejection of its governing principles. This included the Vedic concept of caste, which Shakyamuni Buddha and his Sangha would go on later to deconstruct through various suttas. The Buddhist movement would dissolve the hierarchical caste system wherever it went, for the majority of its spread throughout Asia.

2. THE DHAMMA VS. CASTE

The caste system during the Vedic period leading up to the time of the Buddha’s life, the Mahājanapada period (600-345 BCE), decreed that people ought to live their lives serving the function of their status. This meant that everyone was born into their status and were not permitted to engage in any activity of the upper or lower castes in the hierarchy. It is usually stated that the Brahmin (priest) caste is the most revered, but this was not always the reality and was subject to change by region, regime, or period. In the Mahājanapada period, the Kshatriya (warrior) caste enjoyed the higher status and authority within the Shakya tribe. The Vaishyas (propertied land owners and merchants) answered directly to the Kshatriya, and managed the Sudras (peasant farmers or laborers). The final caste was the Dalits or Panchamas (untouchables) who were responsible for unwanted labor, such as cleaning and handling animal waste or corpses. We know from the Esukari Sutta that this lifestyle was still in practice through the Buddha’s life, but was challenged thereafter. In the Madhura Sutta, the arahant (enlightened monk) Kaccāna was visited by King Avantiputta in Gunda Grove where he would spend most of his time as a hermit monk. King Avantiputta sat upon his chariot to ask Kaccāna what he thought of the caste hierarchy. The abridge version goes something like this: “Venerable Kaccāna, the Brahmins say they are to be honored more than any of the other castes. What do you think about this?” inquired King Avantiputta. “It is just a saying in the world, great king, that ‘Brahmins are the highest caste…heirs of Brahma.’ But what do you think, King Avantiputta— Do not other Brahmins (priests), Kshatriya (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants), and Sudras (laborers) precede and succeed members of their own caste? And if they were to achieve a following of servants eager to please them, and wealth and an abundance of food, will there still not yet be others who have achieved and will achieve the same success?” said Kaccāna, Buddha’s arahant disciple. “There will be, Venerable Kaccāna” admitted King Avantiputta. “Then what would you think, King Avantiputta, if I said Brahmins (priests), Kshatriya (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants), and Sudras (laborers) are still yet capable of shameful deeds, such as murder, ill treatment of corpses, robbery, rape, and debauchery? Would you not admit that they were all capable of the same measure of shame regardless of their caste, or are they not?” asked Kaccāna. “I would say they are all capable of the same misdeeds. I see your point, Venerable Kaccāna.” admitted King Avantiputta.

Kaccāna continued, “Then you see it is just a saying in the world that ‘Brahmins are the highest caste…heirs of Brahma.’ …And suppose a Kshatriya or a Brahmin or a Vaishya or a Sudra were to shave their heads and don the monk’s robes, renouncing the world and giving up unwholesome habits, such as killing, debauchery, and poor diet. Would you be able to determine their caste? Would they not appear the same to you?” King Avantiputta responded eagerly, “They would all appear the same to me, Venerable Kaccāna.”

“And how would you treat them, King Avantiputta?” asked Kaccāna. “I would pay them homage, and treat them as a guest in my presence. Myself and my entourage would offer medicinal attention and accommodation if needed.” And suddenly the realization of the dhamma came over King Avantiputta. He praised Kaccāna for his teachings, and the realization that all people are equal when we understand superficial privileges for what they really are. Buddhism itself exists as an alternative to the Vedic tradition and other practices of society because the Buddha dhamma rejects previous assertions about reality. Buddhism’s very existence in Northern India was a direct critique of early Vedic Hinduism, Jainism (Nigathas in Pali suttas), and strictly Upanishadic Hinduism of the time. As with Kaccāna’s instruction, the Brahmins naturally preach their high status because it is in their own self-interest to do so. And anyone else in that position of privilege would be tempted to do the same. It takes a strong-willed doctrine, such as the Buddha dhamma to transcend from this oppressive mentality. Not only did the Buddha dhamma teach a strict doctrine of egalitarianism, but it also taught that any person could take refuge in the Sangha and seek enlightenment if they were up to the task. Though this did not completely dissolve strife experienced outside of the Sangha, surrounding upāsaka (lay communities) did become less oppressive, especially among lay practitioners whose family members joined the Sangha. Furthermore the idea of the Dalit (outcast) was challenged by the Buddha on many accounts. The most pertinent being the Vasalla Sutta where the Buddha rebukes an arrogant Brahmin at length, and here is my abridged version: One day Shakyamuni Buddha left Anathapindika monastery for receiving dāna (alms) at Savatthi city. He donned his robes and begging bowl and set out to the city as usual. Now, Shakyamuni Buddha was passing by Brahmin Aggika Bharadvaja’s house as he was cooking an offering for the Buddha. The Brahmin was not yet done cooking and lost his temper, so he yelled obscenities at Shakyamuni Buddha, “Stay there, baldy! Wretched monk! You Vasala!” (Vasala is a synonym for Dalit/outcast, which literally means “little man”. A similar term is used in Chinese- “xiăo rén”). The Buddha stopped and spoke to the Brahmin, “Tell me Brahmin, do you know the conditions that qualify someone as being a Vasala (outcast)?” “No I do not, Venerable Gautama Buddha. Please teach me the dhamma’s conditions for who qualifies as being a Vasala.” admitted the Brahmin. “Listen then, Brahmin, and pay attention, I will speak.” said the Buddha. “Yes, Venerable Sir,” replied the Brahmin. “

1. Whosoever is hateful and slanderous.

2. Whosoever murders and lacks sympathy for living beings.

3. Whosoever besieges towns as an oppressor.

4. Whosoever burgles.

5. Whosoever avoids paying their debts.

6. Whosoever assaults pedestrians on the road to steal from them.

7. Whosoever lies at the expense of others.

8. Whosever causes a married woman to be unfaithful.

9. Whosoever being wealthy refuses to support their aging parents.

10. Whosoever assaults and batters their relatives.

11. Whosoever is asked for good advice but answers with ill-advice.

12. Whosoever attempts to conceal their misdeeds.

13. Whosoever is treated as a guest and is served food in other’s homes, but does not do the same for others.

14. Whosoever lies to mendicant monks or Brahmins (about having food).

15. Whosoever is present at mealtime and insults monks or Brahmins [for seeking dāna (alms)].

16. Whosoever self-deluded, speaks asatam (harsh words of intimidation) or falsehood expecting to gain something.

17. Whosoever is boastful and belittles others.

18. Whosoever is capricious and unaware of the harm they cause by their actions.

19. Whosoever reviles the Buddha, the Abbot, or the Sangha.

20. Whosoever not being an arahant pretends to be so is the lowest of outcasts, for they are thieves of all the cosmos.

21. Not by birth is one an outcast; not by birth is one a Brahmin. By deed one becomes an outcast, by deed one becomes a Brahmin.

22. This I recite from experience: There was a Dalit’s son, Sopaka, who became known as Matanga.

23. Matanga attained the highest of fame despite the odds. He was so revered by the Kshatriyas and Brahmins that they attended to him.

24. He achieved this feat by living as Matanga, the ordained monk and following the Noble Eightfold Path. By doing this, he attained enlightenment.

25. His birth as a Dalit did not prevent him from being revered and a witness to the Brahmin’s point of view.

26. High birth does not prevent one from falling into inner-turmoil, or from shame.

27. Not by birth is one an outcast; not by birth is one a Brahmin. By deed one becomes an outcast, by deed one becomes a Brahmin.”

Upon hearing this dhamma, Brahmin Aggika Bharadvaja knelt in praṇāma before Shakyamuni Buddha saying, “O Venerable Gautama Buddha, I promise to participate as one in the upāsaka (laity) with you from now on. I will take refuge in you, the Buddha, your dhamma, and the Sangha. That I promise until the day I die!” The concluding details from this sutta imply that even the proud Brahmin spent the rest of his life supporting the Buddha’s community. And this is surely different from how Brahmins thought society ought to function. The caste was challenged by the Buddha in every way. It may seem the Vasala Sutta states certain aspects of caste society as facts of life, but we can see that anyone could be revered or outcast by their deeds and not by pure accident of birth: “21. Not by birth is one an outcast; not by birth is one a Brahmin. By deed one becomes an outcast, by deed one becomes a Brahmin.” We can see that the weight of the caste system was lessening, and was more regarded as a means of compliment or showing reverence. And in the following centuries the Jatakas suggest that intermarriage between castes began during or just after the Buddha’s life. This was a considerable sign of progress from the Vedic caste system. Such confrontation with the Vedic caste is very much compatible with the emancipatory agenda of anarchists.

We can see that the real lesson in the Buddha dharma is one I call the ‘three potentials’ that are found in Buddhist thought and a plethora of other doctrine: potential 1) all people have the potential to do great moral deeds, 2) all people have the potential to do shameful deeds, and 3) all people have the potential to be mediocre in their deeds. Of course, I grant other variables are possible; this is not a false trichotomy. Rather, this triadic moral principle is meant to highlight the universality of moral potentials. The third potential is one I think not enough people fully understand: being a bystander and enabler to bad deeds/karma, though not a malicious deed renders a person morally dubious. But on the other hand, it is inappropriate to expect direct action from others; this is an imposition that could lead to undue harm. In any case, this principle of ‘three potentials’ is a moral device aimed at showing there is no innate difference between people. There is no way to impose a hierarchy such as the caste on people declaring one is more virtuous or deserving of differential treatment based on the accident of birth. Buddhism declares that it is a person’s deeds that show whether they are honorable. But honorable or not, the Buddha instructed that all living beings are to be treated with the same respect and shall go unharmed by our deeds. This is possible by practicing mettā (benevolence), and avihiṃsā (nonviolence). The Buddha’s dismissal of caste beliefs as roles determined by birth have been present throughout South, East, and Southeast Asia ever since his Sangha was around to spread the dhamma. This is a legacy that anarchists can appreciate.

For India herself, many Indians in the independence movement (1857-1947) did look to Buddhism as a model for liberation from both the oppression of the British Empire and the caste system itself. In regards to whether the caste system would go on to exist, if but as an underlying tradition rather than a visible apparatus for governance, Har Dayal stated, “I do not acknowledge any caste-system, good, bad, or indifferent.” What’s more he would later praise Venerable Mahatma Gandhi’s efforts to uplift the downtrodden untouchables. Dayal voiced his own protest against caste in his essay “Modern India and European Culture” by highlighting India’s subaltern position on the world stage, “All Hindus are pariahs in the society of civilized men and women, whether they are rajas or valets, priests or sweepers. . . .” and concluded, “[the caste system] is the climax of all social inequality.” Like the Madhura Sutta and the Vasala Sutta, Dayal’s statements highlight the sameness in potential regarding all people, and in the latter quote he implied the mundanity of attempts in Indian society to prop up higher castes while the whole of India was deemed subaltern by the world powers of the time. And he would later add that “love transcends all castes” which further points to the sameness of all people regardless of birth. In his paper, “Three Ideas on Education” published in the December issue of Modern View (1925) Dayal called to action the passionate removal of caste: Caste is the curse of India. Caste, in all its forms, has made us a nation of slaves. . . . The priest is our master, but he himself (and all of us) are the slaves of foreigners. This is the fruit of caste. … It is not Islam, and it is not England, that has destroyed India. No, our enemy is within us. Priestcraft [Barahminism] and caste have slain us. This is the truth of history. Hindu Society twice committed suicide. . . . Caste must go, and it must not go slowly and gradually, but immediately and completely and irrevocably. This should be our vow: No compromise with caste in any shape or form, and Hindu unity as our practical social ideal. Har Dayal would later advocate the translation of Pali texts in Western academia, and could be credited as a major influence in this endeavor [to which I am grateful]. He similarly spoke against dogmatism, as in the unquestioned obedience to the Hindu and religious practices within India (to include Islam and Christianity). His strongest case against Hinduism’s dogmatism was written in the September 1926 issue of Modern View where he stated the inevitable result of unquestioned obedience manifested as “child-marriage, purdah (seclusion of women), caste, polygamy, hideous idols, illiteracy and the condition of slavery “ which he then declared, “the Shame of India”. But many religious people might think this is a mere skew of Buddhist doctrine, and that Buddhism merely promotes an alternative dogma in place of other belief systems. But this is not the case, and the next subsection will explain why.

3. THE DHAMMA AND NONDOGMATISM

The term dogma has a few definitions. Its origin in English derives from Catholic Christianity, and is etymologically linked to the Greek word, δόγμα (dogma) which literally means “that which one thinks is true”. The Roman Catholics repurposed the word into Latin to mean, “an inconvertible truth made known through divine revelation”. And since roughly the second century CE, dogma was used as a means to control discourse and enforce a clerical and feudal hierarchy among residents of Christendom. Dogma has come to mean a set of beliefs that are not only “incontrovertible truth”, but enforceable under arbitrary rule. Any challenge against such dogmas in Christendom, and the other Abrahamic religions (Islam and Judaism) has been at one time or another suppressed and condemned. This notion was exacerbated by the concept of divine right that meant the kings or other feudal regents would have unquestioned authority over their people. At certain periods and in some societies, denial of dogma was punishable by death. As a contrast, Buddhism does not have any such requirements. Of course there are social pressures is many communities for people to be Buddhist, but there has been no literature or governing body that mandated subscription to a specific set of beliefs. Of course we can assert instances of violence or suppression in Myanmar, China, Southeast Asia, and Japan. But these instances are not caused by disbelief in specific doctrine. If you search for “Buddhist dogma” on Wikipedia you will come across diṭṭhi (right view). The tenet of diṭṭhi has been offered as an example of Buddhist dogma. But this is a flimsy analogous term, because right view is just one tenet of eight within the Noble Eightfold path. Diṭṭhi cannot be equated with Christian dogma because it is not broad enough to be the framework for most of the Buddhist doctrine in the same way dogma does for Christians. If I were to put on my Christian hat for a moment and try to make an analogy here: it would be like trying to say the keystone tenet of Christianity is the first Beatitude from the Sermon on the Mount, “blessed are the poor [in spirit if Matthew]”. As you may know, there are a few more Beatitudes in that sermon (ten in Matthew and four in Luke). So too is the same for the Noble Eightfold Path, there are eight tenets, and they all comprise just one component of the Buddha’s dhamma (teaching). So I hope that illustrates the incompatibility of diṭṭhi serving as a substitute to dogma. Then there is the collective dhamma being presented as another stand-in for dogma in Buddhist thought. But this cannot be the case either, because the dhamma is the summation of all of Shakyamuni Buddha’s teachings. And if this is the case, then the dhamma would be self-contradictory as a dogma due to various suttas that speak against compulsory belief. The most prevalent sutta is the Kesamutti Sutta, as it specifically addresses the problem with unquestioned beliefs in this excerpt [numbers are my own]:

1. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing (anussava),

2. nor upon tradition (paramparā),

3. nor upon rumor (itikirā),

4. nor upon what is in a scripture (piṭaka-sampadāna)

5. nor upon conjecture (takka-hetu),

6. nor upon an axiom (naya-hetu),

7. nor upon fallacious reasoning (ākāra-parivitakka),

8. nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over (diṭṭhi-nijjhān-akkh-antiyā),

9. nor upon another’s seeming ability (bhabba-rūpatāya),

10. nor upon the consideration, The monk is our teacher (samaṇo no garū)

Kalamas, when you yourselves know: “These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness”, enter on and abide in them.

It just so happens that the above passages hit on every aspect of political indoctrination. This is quite astounding for how advanced they are in terms of discussions regarding belief.

The first instruction, anussava, relates to belief by rote memorization. This is often forced upon pupils or citizens through educational institutions and quite often the news media today. Less resolute or acquiescent people will exhibit strong beliefs in things simply because they hear about them so often.

The second instruction, paramparā, is just as astounding as the first because it warns against the appeal to tradition. This is often known as the informal fallacy, argumentum ad antiquitatem (appeal to tradition), that states that a claim is not true simply because people hold it as a tradition or have believed it was true for some amount of time. Similarly, rumors or hearsay, the third instruction, itikirā, are not reliable sources of truth because, even if a person is convinced of the truth of something, it does not mean they remember it completely and clearly. This is why hearsay is not admissible as evidence in any scientific setting. Yet, corrupt governing officials and business owners appeal to hearsay as a source for decision-making processes all the time. It is interesting the fourth instruction, piṭaka-sampadāna, uses the term piṭaka which is self-referential to the Buddhist doctrine, the Pali Canon. So, in English it is translated as scripture, but the scripture in question is the sutta itself as it exists within the Sutta Piṭaka which is a pivotal source of the Pali Canon as a whole.

The fifth teaching, takka-hetu, warns against conjecture, or assumptions based on preconceived notions. The sixth, naya-hetu, warns against axioms and again I think this is self-referential, because the axioms in question here would be popular phrases the Buddha or similar instructors would be preaching at the time. Axioms, maxims, truisms, or aphorisms, have strength in being memorable and seem true enough that many people simply repeat them and use them heuristically in society- which is often fast-paced and unaccommodating to lengthy discussion. But when we go through our whole lives assuming the truth of an axiom without investigation, it could lead to the acceptance of a fallacious rationale or bald assertions. The other weakness of axioms is that people can remember their content, but not the context nor the deeper meaning to them.

By extension of the sixth instruction, the seventh, ākāra-parivitakka, warns against fallacious reasoning at all. The term ākāra is literally defined as shape or form, but it has another definition meaning appearance, aspect, or image. And parivitakka means a reflection or consideration. And I think this is founded in the Buddha’s description of reality— the Three Marks of Existnece: anicca (impermanence), dukkha (dissatisfaction), and anattā (non-self) — and our delusions about reality, known as the Five Aggregates or Khandha. These are delusions we have that prevent us from seeing reality for what it is. The Five Aggregates are: rūpa (form), vedanā (sensation), saññā (perception), saṅkhāra (mental formations), and viññāṇa (consciousness).

In summary, these five concepts we have about the world are fallacious because they fail to recognize anicca (impermanence), our inability to sense certain aspects of reality, our biases, our unskillful thoughts, and they delude us into clinging to the delusions of the self that have no basis in the aforementioned aspects. The eighth instruction, diṭṭhi-nijjhān-akkh-antiyā, is also self-referential and is really about not misinterpreting the origins of one’s insight as it could be skewed by bias.

As stated above, the term diṭṭhi means right view. Nijjhān means insight, akkh refers to what the eye sees, and antiyā are the ideas we have pondered before. The ninth instruction, bhabba-rūpatāya, should be of interest to anarchists in that it speaks against following charismatic leaders or those we think are particularly skillful on those qualities alone. That disposition only leads to unquestioned servitude via admiration. The tenth instruction, samaṇo no garū, also leans towards anarchism because it is the antithesis to the appeal to authority fallacy. A proposition is not true merely based on the assertion that a person in authority said it was true. And a person’s perceived rank is not sufficient to substantiate their claims just as it is not enough for any other person. Every person needs to demonstrate and justify why their viewpoint merits consideration, and they come under greater scrutiny if they are claiming to state the truth about a subject. If Buddhists really apply the Kesamutti Sutta as a logical device, then they absolutely cannot be dogmatic in any sense. And if this is the case, the nondogmatic disposition of Buddhism allows adherents to question and analyze any propositions that come their way, including the basis of authority of others. The Kesamutti Sutta is a powerful instrument that warns against indoctrination and unquestioned loyalty to so-called leaders, secular or religious. And in a time when Brahmins were believed to have privileged authority over other castes, the Buddha’s Sangha (community of bikkhu monks and bikkhuni nuns) functioned as a rapidly spreading commune that would provide an alternative to established society.

4. THE SANGHA: A COMMUNE SEPARATE FROM POLITICAL AUTHORITY

The Buddhist Sangha is often compared to the Benedictine and Augustinian orders of European Christian monks. And this parallel has some uses. But the deference and reverence of the Christian monk vis-à-vis the Buddhist monk is quite different. The Buddhist monk or nun is a renunciant, not to get closer to God and receive rewards in heaven, but to achieve enlightenment, or in the very least, renounce the world as it is polluted with undue suffering. The Sangha was essentially a movement that would attract thousands of followers within Shakyamuni Buddha’s lifetime, and it was founded by people who lived off of the charity (dāna) of their surrounding communities. Any veneration for monks or nuns received from people in those communities was out of sincere respect alone, and clearly not from a tradition of obedience.

There was a sense of shared dignity that emanated from the Sangha, as it was attested in the suttas. And though many monks were indeed venerated, they were not so until they proved themselves to be sagacious in deed and speech. Authority in early Buddhist society had no linkage to possessions, status, or wealth. Their critique of property ownership is even compatible with the works of Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Rocker. The Dhammapada, possibly chief among all Pali Canon texts, states in the subsection Dhammattha Vagga: (discourse on the just), that one is not deserving of respect merely because of their perceived status from birth, age, or charisma, but rather the sum of all their deeds: 260. A monk is not an elder because his head is gray. He is but ripe in age, and he is called one grown old in vain. 261. One in whom there is truthfulness, virtue, inoffensiveness, restraint and self-mastery, who is free from defilements and is wise — he is truly called an Elder. 262. Not by mere eloquence nor by beauty of form does a man become accomplished, if he is jealous, selfish and deceitful. 263. But he in whom these are wholly destroyed, uprooted and extinct, and who has cast out hatred — that wise man is truly accomplished. Shakyamuni Buddha also warned against false confidence in obedience to rules, rituals, and pedantry.

These habits so often manifest as means of authoritarianism, and this principle would ideally promise that Sangha would remain an egalitarian commune that guaranteed equal opportunity to its residents. And if an anarchist commune would be modeled with a similar ethic to these principles, it could safeguard against the rise would-be despots: 271-272. Not by rules and observances, not even by much learning, nor by gain of absorption, nor by a life of seclusion, nor by thinking, “I enjoy the bliss of renunciation, which is not experienced by the worldling” should you, O monks, rest content, until the utter destruction of cankers (Arahantship) is reached. In the Dhammapada’s Bhikkhu Vagga (discourse on monks), Shakyamuni Buddha gives an emancipatory instruction, 376.

“Let him associate with friends who are noble, energetic, and pure in life, let him be cordial and refined in conduct. Thus, full of joy, he will make an end of suffering.” This passage provides an impetus for would-be members of the Sangha to retreat from oppression. Similarly the Buddha warned against oppression by means of violence in the Danda Vagga (discourse on violence). 131. “One who, while himself seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other beings who also desire happiness, will not attain happiness hereafter.” And it has been the anarchist critique that oppressive violence has always been the basis for anarchist thought, or as Proudhon described it, “oppression, misery, and crime”. Like many anarchist communes today, the Sangha is meant to survive on charity (dāna) and barter alone. This communal subsistence is often called “the economy of gifts” and would ideally allow monastics to sever ties from whatever political regime that existed around them at the time.

These days a Sangha exists within a nation-state regardless of their means of subsistence, and this typically renders the upkeep of a Sangha nearly impossible where the tradition is not the norm. And this is just another sign of oppression and systemic violence. But this doesn’t change the fact that wherever a Sangha exists, there is a potential for people within a political realm to seek refuge in the Buddhist community and attain a new life, and oftentimes a new name upon ordination. Many ordained monks went on to be given the title of arahant (an enlightened monk) and they continued Shakamuni’s teachings, assembling in the First Council in Rajagada (5th c. BCE) and Second Council in Vesali (4th c. BCE) whereby much of the Buddhist tradition was chronicled and passed down verbally until written tradition took over during the reign of King Vaṭṭagāmiṇi in the 1st century BCE, and this was when the Pali Canon was formed. Since much of the early Canon survived while containing suttas that encouraged critical thought, it is only logical to conclude that the Sangha upheld emancipatory doctrine at least until Vaṭṭagāmiṇi’s reign. So far we have seen Buddhist thought challenge filial piety through the tale of young Siddhartha Gautama’s escape from this oligarchic father’s rule, notions of hierarchy existing as the caste system, and political life by way of the Sangha.

Finally this essay will conclude with a discussion about how the Buddha was viewed vis-à-vis the Hindu pantheon, and the parables that narrate discourses he has with the gods of Hinduism.

5. THE BUDDHA VIS-À-VIS HINDU GODS

The Ayacana Sutta contains a discourse between the Buddha and a syncretic deity called Brahma Sahampati. This is most likely the chief creator god of the Hindu pantheon: Brahma, of which the Brahmin caste is said to descend from. Yet, this notion is somewhat ambiguous because certain tales regarding Brahma, as opposed to the Brahman, in Buddhist literature is inconsistent at times. In any case, the Ayacana Sutta provides a narrative discourse that I like to think of as a parable, but I will provide an abridged version first before explaining what I mean: In a time when Shakyamuni Buddha had attained Buddhahood, he meditated at Uruvela on the bank of the Nerañjara River, at the foot of a goatherd’s Banyan Tree.

In deep reflection the Buddha thought, “This dhamma I have attained is so deep, and so refined, that it will be hard to transmit to others. It seems the whole world is living in delusion, and it will be next to impossible for them to comprehend this dhamma. And if I set out to teach the dhamma to them without proper preparation, it will only result in dissatisfaction.” After some time meditating on these thoughts, the Buddha slowly shifted into an equanimous trance, preferring to be at peace with himself over ruminating over failure in transmitting the dhamma.

In this state the god Brahma Sahampati perceived what Shakyamuni Buddha was thinking and spoke to him from the heavens, “All is lost, Tathagatha (great teacher). You prefer to remain in your equanimous state rather than teach the dhamma. If you dare not teach the dhamma you just attained, the world will not know the just from the unjust!” Brahma Sahampati left his heavenly realm to appear in front of the Buddha. He knelt in praṇāma, placing his right hand over his heart. “Lord Buddha, I implore you to teach your dhamma. In the past there appeared among the Magadhansan impure dhamma devised by the stained. Your dhamma is unstained and whole. Please emancipate this world’s people from their pitiful state of suffering. Free them from the oppression caused by craving and suffering.” The Buddha envisioned the world and its people in many different walks of life. He glimpsed people of keen awareness and presence of mind, and individuals worn and dulled by nature and the experiences of life. It was just as in a pond of blue or red or white lotuses, some lotuses — born and growing in the water — might flourish while immersed in the water, without rising up from the water; some might stand at an even level with the water; while some might rise up from the water and stand without being smeared by the water. He could see the potential for those who might learn the dhamma, and those who are not yet capable due to their karma.

Upon this revelation, the Buddha spoke, “I shall open my doors to those who are willing to enter. Let them show their conviction. I realized that I was not willing to teach the dhamma for I thought trouble would arise. O Brahma, I did not tell people the sublime dhamma.” Upon hearing this, Brahma Sahampati understood the Buddha resolved to teach the dhamma and disappeared. This parable places the Buddha above the god Brahma Sahampati from the moment he appeared to the Buddha. He knelt in praṇāma, and placed his hand on his heart. This gesture is a reverential salutation, and his hand on his heart signifies his reverence deeper still. The dialogue also suggests the Buddha is placed above the god, as he does not change his position or demeanor upon Brahma Sahampati’s arrival. All visual depictions of this moment show the Buddha in padmasana (the lotus position) above Brahma Sahampati, and the latter kneeling in praṇāma. The prevalence of this fact shows the dhamma is superior over any belief in gods and their supposed authority on Earth. This deity is meant to be chief and progenitor of the Brahmin caste, and Buddhists dared to place their patriarchal creator god below the god they appealed to legitimize their own status over other castes. Thanissaro Bikkhu’s translation of the Brahma-nimantanika Sutta is prefaced by an interesting observation regarding the habit of Brahmins and other monotheistic proponents. He states that Mara (the god of craving, delusion, and death) is the source for those who demand obedience to a creator god. This observation also concludes for us that Buddhist thought is opposed to dogmatism, and hierarchy for a number of reasons. Brahmanism is a hierarchical belief-system that justifies all its practice by appealing to a creator god as the source of goodness.

Here, Mara is understood as imitating the figure of Brahma and also possessing the minds of Brahmins subordinate to their chief, named Baka. Baka is shown to be self-deluded in thinking he has achieved a Brahmanic form of enlightenment, but Shakyamuni Buddha shows him that this is Mara taking over and deceiving him. Shakyamuni Buddha’s initial critique of Baka was that he claimed his revelation was unchanging and eternal. This is a denial of the dhamma’s tenet of anicca (impermanence) and in reverse to how Brahma Shampati appeared to the Buddha— the Buddha appeared to Baka to glimpse his delusional realm at the royal sal tree in the Subhaga forest in Ukkattha. And in a similar fashion the Buddha was greeted by Baka as an honored guest saying, “Welcome good sir. It has been long since you arranged to come here — for this place is constant. This is permanent. This is eternal. This is total.

This is not subject to falling away — for here one does not take birth, does not age, does not die. And there is nothing beyond this.” Shakyamuni Buddha rebuked Baka, “How immersed in your delusion you are, Brahmin Baka! This is your ignorance: what is inconstant you declare constant! What is impermanent you declare permanent! What is partial you declare total! Where all is subject to falling away- you declare it will not fall away! What is born, ages and dies, you declare does not!” At the Buddha’s words, Mara possessed one of Baka’s subordinates in protest, “Monk, monk, do not rebuke this Brahmin. He is the most revered among us, for he has achieved a state of enlightenment in the company of our Lord Brahma. The creator of all, and father to us all.” Mara went on to state the division of Brahmins who disobeyed Brahma’s law, and those who obeyed. Of course, he stated that the disobedient were incarnated into a “coarse body” and those who obeyed were given “refined bodies”. He then implored the Buddha, “So please obey Lord Brahma, don’t you see his assembly is gathered here?” The Buddha’s attention was turned towards the gathering of Brahmins. The Buddha leveled his rebuke towards Mara directly as he was in possession of the gathering, “I know you, Evil One. Don’t assume, ‘He doesn’t know me.’ You are Mara, Evil One. And Brahma, and Brahma’s assembly, and the attendants of Brahma’s assembly have all fallen into your hands. They have all fallen into your power. And you think, ‘This one, too, has come into my hands, has come under my control.’ But, Evil One, I have neither come into your hands nor have I come under your control.”

At this the Brahmin Baka addressed the Buddha once again, “But surely you understand that what is constant is constant… …what is permanent is permanent, and what is not born, ages, and dies, is eternal. That from this realm, there is nothing beyond. Surely you know that Brahmins before me have attained this insight and their attainment was passed on for generations to come.” Shakyamuni Buddha heard Baka and went on to explain that his appeal to tradition and delusion was a self-imagined realm created in his own mind. The Buddha explained, “The realm you describe contains celestial bodies that revolve around the Earth- that come and go. They illuminate the world and cast shadows from either direction. You have influence over beings who come and go. There are epochs here. This is not eternal. But there are other realms known as the Ābhassara that you have not seen, and do not know exist- at least not any longer. You have been here for so long that your memory of the impermanent is faded. You have mistaken me to be of ordinary birth and insight, but I am the Tathagata (teacher of the dhamma) and I have seen beyond your delusion. Having come to known the rudimentary elements for what they are, I have insight into your realm as well as all the others” Baka Brahmin was displeased at the Buddha’s dhamma and protested, “If this is what you think of my realm, I will disappear from you this instant.” “Disappear from me if you can.” Shakyamuni Buddha responded. Then Baka strained pensively thinking “Disappear, I will disappear.” But he could not. So then the Buddha retorted, “Well if you will not disappear, I will in your stead.” Baka looked up from his concentration, “Yes, disappear from me, monk- if you can.” The Buddha said he fabricated a psychic trick that made it seem as though his body was gone, but his voice remained. He recited to the congregation of Brahmins, “Having seen danger right in becoming, and becoming searching for non-becoming, I didn’t affirm any kind of becoming, or cling to any delight.” The whole congregation was astounded by this trick and praised the Buddha saying, “How awesome that he could do this!” and “This is the power of Shakyamuni, sage of the Shakya tribe, the Buddha. No Brahmin has done this before.”

Then Mara spoke from the congregation again, “O Buddha, if this is your dhamma, it should not be taught to the laity. As many enlightened ones before you did not lower themselves to teach the laity, so you should also abstain from this practice. You have more to gain from remaining at peace with yourself, in seclusion away from others.” Shakyamuni Buddha exposed Mara again for what he is, “I know it is you, Mara. Evil One. You are ever on your mission to prevent the dhamma from being taught. For you lack sympathy for those who suffer. You would rather the laity to remain ignorant of the dhamma so they may go on suffering as they do. I am the Tathagata, and my duty is to teach the dhamma. Your Brahmins have carried on telling the world they are self-awakened and delude themselves and others into thinking they were self-awakened. But I am truly self-awakened. Just as a palmyra tree that grows to have its canopy cut off is incapable of growing again; so, too, the fermentations that defile, that lead to further becoming, that that cause stress, suffering, aging, and death: Those I the Buddha have renounced, their root destroyed, like an uprooted palmyra tree, deprived of the conditions of development, not destined for future arising.” Mara could no longer deny Shakyamuni Buddha was indeed self-awakened and enlightened, so he vanished as he always had from the Buddha.

The Brahma-nimantanika Sutta puts the Buddha above the gods by proxy of the Brahmin Baka, and Mara. Not only that, but this sutta renders all means of control for the Brahmin caste ineffectual. The political and metaphysical assertions of the Brahmin are no longer legitimate so long as the Buddha is around to teach the dhamma. And here Mara is shown to be the proponent of obedience to hierarchy and theocracy by way of allegory. Since Mara is the embodiment of corruption and delusion in humans, and he possesses the Brahmin congregation in this parable, it is very clear that the Buddha dhamma is opposed to oppression by show of authority of any kind. Other gods in the Hindu pantheon, such as Indra, function as supplicants in Buddhist suttas. These tales put them below the Buddha in reverence, and this also shows a notion of irreverence to the Hindu pantheon as a whole.

The Hindu pantheon fell into irreligion in the minds of early Buddhists, and functioned merely as a narrative conduit through which the dhamma was transmitted. In Thanisarro Bikkhu’s translation of the Sakka-pañha Sutta the Buddha delivers an entire sutta to Indra (called Sakka in the Pali) as council on the problem of evil: that is, despite the dhamma’s teaching that everyone should abstain from doing evil (including hypothetical beings existing elsewhere), wrongdoing is a common occurrence (the hypothetical beings are said to do immoral things in scriptures as well). Below is my abridged version: Shakyamuni Buddha answered Indra, “As you know, the devas, asuras, and nagas, and all the other hypothetical beings are said to be fettered by envy and greed. They preach they are above violence and rivalry, but we find they are constantly thrown into jealous conflict.” Indra was delighted by the Buddha’s words and praised him. “You speak of the truth, venerated sage. Your words have allayed my doubts.” he said. Yet, Indra had more to ask of the Buddha, “But sage, what is the cause of their envy and greed?”

The Buddha answered, “The source of their envy and greed is caused by the bias of what they hold dear and what they do not. This bias is caused by taṇhā (desire) which indicates the fallibility of these souls. And instead of viewing all with the same impartial gaze, with equanimity, they live per their biased preference.” Indra understood but then asked, “But what is the source of taṇhā, dear sage?” Shakyamuni Buddha replied, “The source of taṇhā is the mind. The mind has a habit of papañca (objectification) which stems from the mistaken belief in attā (permanent self).

This is a mistake because all things are impermanent including the self. When the mind develops, this habit of objectification is increased over time, and so too does taṇhā since there was no skillful intervention. Thus this is the unskillful mental state.” Hearing this, Indra then asked, “Venerated sage, how does one treat this unskillful mental state?” Shakyamuni Buddha spoke, “Everyone understands the concepts of joy, grief, and equanimity at some point in their lives. Joy, grief and equanimity each have two outcomes that separate by whether one makes an effort or does not. Knowing the emotion of joy without making an effort is but a way to feel suffering. The pursuit of joy through effort will decrease suffering and lead to true joy. Similarly, grief without effort will linger and compound suffering, but grief with the effort promoted by the dhamma brings peace. The pursuit of equanimity without skillful effort will lead to suffering. But seeking equanimity with effort by way of the dhamma leads to equanimity indeed.”

The Buddha instructed Indra further about how the senses deceive us into unskillful mental states. Indra humbly thanked Shakyamuni Buddha and admitted, “Taṇhā is a disease and a yearning arrow! It seduces even devas like me. Surely, we devas were brought to war with the asuras, and when we won I though all the spoils of both realms would fall to the devas. But upon hearing the dhamma and the teachings of avihiṃsā (nonviolence) I became disillusioned with our kamma. And when I questioned the Brahmins for council, they could never answer my burning questions regarding these unskillful states. Yet you have! The Brahmins could only return my question with further questions. They doubted my identity, but when I admitted I am Indra, the deva king come as Sakka, and spoke to them of your dhamma as much as I knew, they delighted in me and praised me as their patron. But lord, Buddha, you are my Tathagata: the keeper of the true and whole dhamma.” Indra was satisfied with the Buddha’s teachings and praised him three times declaring him the worthy, the blessed, and the self-awakened one (the meaning of the word ‘Buddha’). This parable of Indra’s visit to the Buddha highlights again the subjugation of Hindu gods. Indra states above that the Brahmins praised him for only imparting a fragment of the Buddha’s dhamma.

This sutta fully illustrates the deconstruction of the Hindu pantheon, caste and subsequent political structures. The parables within the dhammas also serve the function of teaching the dhamma by way of dialogue. This rhetorical device, though found in Vedic texts and the Mahabharata, the role of the deva god is always subjugated below the man, the Buddha. At some point Indra as Sakka was declared by Buddhagosa to have transcended into becoming the Bodhisattva, Vajrapāṇi. This ascension within Buddhist thought is actually a means of dissolving hierarchy, as any person can achieve Buddhahood. What’s more a Buddha is considered further on the path to enlightenment than a Bodhisattva.

CONCLUSION

In this essay, we first discussed Prince Siddhartha’s defiance against his father, Oligarch Śuddhodana and how this defiance broke from hierarchical concepts such as patriarchy and filial piety; secondly we explored the dhamma’s stance on the Hindu caste system in Northern India, in the Buddha’s time and in the 20th century; thirdly we examined specific texts and concepts accredited to the Buddha that oppose dogmatism; fourthly, we saw that the Sangha has functioned as a commune existing beyond the limits of monarchies and oligarchies, and how they often function as sanctuaries beyond political realms; finally we examined abridged tales of the Buddha and his discourses with the Hindu gods where the justifications for oppression, oligarchy, hierarch, patriarchy, and monarchy were deconstructed within the suttas. And the above is just a fraction of the literature available regarding the Buddha’s dhamma. Siddhatha Gautama, the Buddha of the Shakya tribe, Shakyamuni, was declared by the hermit yogi Asita that he would either be a conqueror or a sage. And despite oligarch Śuddhodana’s wishes, Shakyamuni Buddha determined to become a sage.

From the very beginning he rejected the premise of political life in Mahājanapada period India. His early life story warns against information being concealed in order to manipulate others. The Buddha’s dhamma would then live on to be one of the single-most convicting critiques of the caste system.

The Buddha himself declared all people are created equal. And later Mahatma Gandhi, Indian independence activists, and anarchist theorists would look to Buddhism for answers regarding how to undo the caste’s hierarchy. Suttas like the Kesamutti Sutta warned specifically against gullibility and acceptance of authority prima facie, which departs from all other belief systems deemed religious in some way and is in accordance with anarchist principles. What’s more, the Buddha’s Sangha was a refuge from political life for all people, from Kshatriya kings to Brahmins, to Dalit untouchables. the Sangha is an equal-opportunity commune that subsists without the use of money or assets.

This was a direct affront to the market system of the time, and even drew the ire of nearby merchants. And the entire basis for hierarchy in ancient Indian society was challenged by the Buddhist dhamma. Their creator gods were subjugated, allegorically dismissed, and so the concept of divine right of rule in the Indian rendition was challenged by the dhamma.

I will be first to admit that Buddhism and anarchism part ways at a few very important junctures, but they remain compatible if we remain nondogmatic about either tradition. Both worldviews have indeed come to be synthesized in my own mind in the same way this essay was written, as I have taken the precept of avihiṃsā nonviolence.

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written by Nico Armin

MAIN IMAGE: Uchiyama Gudō (内山 愚童; d. 1911), Japanese Sōtō Zen Buddhist priest and anarcho-communist activist, who was one of the few Buddhist leaders who spoke out against the Meiji government in its imperialist projects and was amongst the twelve anarchists executed in the High Treason Case (幸徳事件 / Kōtoku Jiken), born. Gudō was an outspoken advocate for redistributive land reform, overturning the Meiji emperor system, encouraging conscripts to desert en masse and advancing democratic rights for all. He also criticised Zen leaders who claimed that low social position was justified by karma and who sold abbotships to the highest bidder.

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