Ascending Into Anarchy
Step through the Overton window into a political Wonderland. Down is up. Left is Right. Anarchy is order.
Canada’s largest-ever act of civil disobedience is ongoing in Fairy Creek, British Columbia, where protesters are trying to save some of the last old-growth forest left in the region—and, for that matter, the world. And these protesters are being confronted by police whose guiding philosophy is symbolized by the “thin blue line” patches they wear on their uniforms.
These patches have been embraced by many police in defiance of the Black Lives Matter movement, with the clear implication that, actually, Blue Lives Matter. But the symbolism itself is not overtly racist. Its official meaning is summarized in the article “Thin Blue Line Against Anarchy”, written by a police officer for Psychology Today:
Although a cynical viewpoint, the [idea] is that if human beings were left to their own devices, they would be deprived of something and revert to some animal state where the only thing that mattered was their personal satisfaction. On the other hand, the police in a society, under government authority, provide the checks and balances through enforcement of laws, thus creating order or restoring order. People are safe, the planes fly on time, and balance is restored. Personal gain and self-satisfaction through animal instincts are tempered by agents of justice who stand between law and lawlessness. A thread holds a disorderly society together. It is commonly held, then, that without the police, anarchy would prevail.
In other words, in this view, the police exist to fight anarchy, which is an existential menace that springs straight from our genes. And, in case we think that by “anarchy” he really means “chaos”, the author also adds that:
It [is] commonly held that society in a condition of anarchy—that is, without law or authority—would be in complete chaos.
This singling out of “anarchy” is not entirely about semantics, therefore; nor is it anything new. Back in the 1950’s, long before Black Live Matter, we find the Los Angeles Police branding themselves the “thin blue line” that stood “between law, order, and anarchy”. Long before that, even, in the 1880’s, we find a self-identified anarchist complaining that:
“Every conceivable crime is laid to our charge, and opinion, too indolent to learn the truth, is easily persuaded that anarchy is but another name for wickedness and chaos.”
But as effective as this long-running propaganda campaign has been, the truth about anarchy has not been buried completely. Embedded in our collective consciousness, working patiently underground like an old mole, it still guides our thinking even if we are unaware of its influence. It reassures us that self-proclaimed anarchists are not, in fact, an existential threat. It keeps the term “anarchist group” from sounding contradictory. It reminds us that many popular resistance movements—like Black Lives Matter—have actually used anarchist principles to organize themselves.
And when the old mole finally appears on the surface, it undermines the propaganda, and shows us that the great engine of chaos is not anarchy at all, but hierarchy.
The dark side of the thin blue line
This mole was set loose by the French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first historical figure to actually embrace the label, “anarchist”.
Proudhon was certainly considered an extremist in his day, but no more so than another extremist named Karl Marx. In fact, Proudhon was a significant influence on Marx. Both men, moreover, lived in revolutionary times, and were very much products of that time; both men wanted to change the civilized world, but of course neither wanted to destroy it. Both men wanted to destroy the state, it is true, but only in the course of building a better society; and both wanted to abolish private property, but not the possessions that people use to live and work.
More than anything else, however, what both Proudhon and Marx wanted was to overthrow capitalism and, in doing so, to emancipate the working classes.
Indeed, where Proudhon and Marx differed was not so much on what kind of society to build—they were both socialists—but rather on how to build it. Proudhon objected to Marx’s ideas about concentrating power in the hands of workers; in turn, Marx ridiculed the economic model that Proudhon advocated as a more decentralized means of change. But the goal of these two battle plans was essentially the same.
The differences between anarchists and Marxists are harder to generalize today, as the two traditions have matured, grown, and become more diffuse. This process, which has even birthed philosophy called anarcho-communism, has made Proudhon and Marx increasingly niche within their own traditions. Retroactively, their ideas have been labeled as “mutualist anarchism” and a “Marxist communism”, illustrating their diminished importance within the respective movements they fathered. But these two labels also illustrate what is perhaps the most consistent distinction between anarchists and communists, with one being named for its operative principle (mutualism) and the other for its author (Marx): while communists are preoccupied with the grand strategies of great revolutionary thinkers, as one scholar writes
Anarchists like to distinguish themselves by what they do, and how they organize themselves to go about doing it.
This is not because the anarchist tradition is devoid of great thinkers, of course—Proudhon’s work was continued by Mikhail Bakunin (“Socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality”), Peter Kropotkin (“Mutual aid is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle”), and Emma Goldman (“If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution”), just to name a very few—rather, the observation highlights a major theme uniting the mountain of anarchist literature. The most prominent modern-day anarchist, Noam Chomsky, describes this theme succinctly:
Anarchism. . . seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, domination, [and] authority that constrain human development, and then it seeks to subject them to a very reasonable challenge: ‘justify yourself’.
No one expects the Spanish Revolution
To structures that would immediately fail this test—like the police—anarchism is indeed a threat. But it is not a menace to civilized society, as we are told. To be sure, the history of anarchism itself is filled with violence (“like all innovators, whether violent or pacific,” explains one anarchist, “we bring not peace but a sword”), but this only makes the lie more pernicious, since most of this violence has been inflicted upon anarchists by (you guessed it) police.
Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that this lie—that anarchy means chaos—is not merely disputed in theory, but also by history. Even putting aside the countless pre-industrial societies that have lacked centralized authority (not to mention anarchist armies like the Zapatistas, worker-managed businesses like Mondragon, and non-hierarchical collaborative projects like Linux), there is still that time when anarchy reigned in a little place called half of Spain.
The moment—often relegated to a footnote in the history of the Spanish Civil War, which is itself often treated as a footnote to World War Two—was short-lived, but it nonetheless provides a glimpse into the true nature of anarchism, even when applied to a large, modern, industrial society much like our own. Anarchists, organized by an anarcho-syndicalist worker’s union, participated in government, operated factories, organized militias, and printed newspapers. Mass murder did not immediately ensue—for that, you had to await the fascist dictatorship that followed.
Not to suggest that the Spanish experience with anarchy left no scars at all. For example, modern-day Spain is currently struggling with a growing community of anarchist squatters that targets vacationing homeowners. The squatters, of course, are accused of sowing chaos; thanks to their anarchist heritage, however, the squatters know better.
No jungle, no prison
The actions of every self-proclaimed “anarchist” are not thereby justified, of course, nor are their ideas necessarily correct. But this still contrasts favorably to adherents of the thin blue line. The philosopher-kings of law enforcement tell us that their job—the very reason for their existence—is to stem the tide of “anarchy” in which, they say, people would “revert to some animal state where the only thing that mattered was their personal satisfaction”. In practice, however, this is precisely what they enforce—only its true name is “capitalism”.
Indeed, it is no coincidence that capitalism finds its purest form in neoliberals, otherwise known (in America) as “libertarians”, otherwise known as “anarcho-capitalists”. Nor is it coincidence that capitalism is celebrated for the very attributes for which anarchy is condemned, albeit in prettier language. Thus, while we are told that anarchism indulges “animal instincts”, capitalism indulges our “human nature”; and while anarchism is driven by “selfishness”, capitalism is driven by our “self-interest”. The distinction without a difference is instructive: what remains to distinguish anarchist acts from capitalist acts, in this view, is simply that the former are illegal and perpetrated by the poor.
But deep down in the collective consciousness lurks our old friend, the old mole. It remembers the brutal repression anarchists have faced in the past, and it can smell the propaganda of the present. It knows that capitalism offends human nature, despite what we are told. It knows that “freedom and equality are in the end the same thing”, since freedom without equality describes living in the jungle, whereas equality without freedom describes living in prison. And it knows that capitalism, premised on the falsehood that we can have one without the other, cannot help but sow chaos.
Of course, the message of anarchism only becomes more urgent as capitalism continues to raze our biosphere. The chaos of Fairy Creek, where well over a thousand people have been arrested for the sake of a forest, is bound to spread. And thus it is an unlikely coincidence that the capitalists logging Fairy Creek have enlisted the “Thin Blue Line Against Anarchy” to make these arrests. After all:
“To do otherwise”, the logging company said in a statement, “would be to allow anarchy to reign”.
Postscript: In 2018, an anarchist group in Hamilton, Ontario was ordered to remove the circle “A” symbol from its headquarters by City officials who—allegedly at the direction of the police—characterized it as “hate material” and compared it to the swastika. But they quickly backpedaled after the issue attracted national media, and police denied involvement.