(en) Irish Anarchist Review #7 - Review of Volume 2 of the Anarchist FAQ

Back before many people had discovered the internet a small group of anarchists including 
this writer began work on the Anarchist FAQ. We were tired of having to provide the same 
basic explanations over and over as new people joined the news net group, 
alt.soc.anarchism, so we began the FAQ so newcomers could be referred to it. ---- I soon 
dropped out of the project as did most of the others involved but a small group, with Iain 
McKay the most active among them, kept working on it year after year. In the sixteen years 
that have passed the FAQ has became huge and an exhaustive argument for anarchism. ---- 
Long texts are hard to read off a computer screen so publication of the FAQ in a printed 
form was an obvious step. Volume 2 of the FAQ has just been published by AK Press, it is a 
six hundred plus page volume containing sections G-J of the FAQ.

Each section is broken down into twenty or more specific questions which once posed are 
answered with extensive references to current research in that area.

Section G, 'Is individualist anarchism capitalistic' reveals something of the origins of 
the FAQ. The arguments we found most tiresome back in the 1990's were those with so called 
'anarcho- capitalists'. Although this is a very rare ideology, in the early days of the 
web the numbers on the anarchist forums were way out of proportion with the numbers found 
offline - I had never in fact met one anyway. That's because the early web included a lot 
of techies influenced by the ideas of Ayn Rand, a Russian exile who preached a 
particularly anti-social message of individualism and naked capitalism.

Rand was popular with Silicon valley types, because her ideology provided them with 
justification for trying to enclose the commons that comprised the early internet into the 
'for profit' structures that are taken for granted today. This is a tension that remains 
today, between those who see the internet as a personal route to becoming rich and those 
who see it as an important tool for the liberation of information and people. It's no 
coincidence that an electronic form of the FAQ has been distributed with Debian variants 
of Linux, including Ubuntu and Mint for many years.

Rand was for a minimal state rather than the abolition of the state, but some of those 
influenced by her started to promote a version in which they wanted the state entirely 
replaced by private security companies enforcing contract law. And some of these decided 
not only that this could be called anarchism but that it was the only real anarchism.

As part of that process they tried to claim the individualist anarchists as their 
intellectual for fathers. Section G of the FAQ started as a reply to that attempt, but 
today is a very detailed description of what Individualist anarchists believed and where 
they differed with the social anarchism or organisations like the Workers Solidarity Movement.

Section H flips the discussion of Section G on its head to look at the arguments between 
anarchists and the state socialists. For anyone on the left this is probably one of the 
most useful sections of the FAQ, covering as it does everything from looking at how Marx 
and those who followed him often misrepresented anarchism to a detailed account of 
anarchism and the Russian revolution.

Section G & H between them remind me of one of the best snippets of the Russian anarchist 
Michael Bakunin, that "Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism 
without liberty is slavery and brutality." The flip side of the anti- state capitalist 
embracing the early internet as a way of making profit, was the fear of much of the 
authoritarian left of that same technology as being beyond the grasp of their mechanism of 
top down control of the channels of information and debate. The point at which the FAQ has 
jumped from the internet into the 'real world' of inland paper has also been the point 
where both those tendencies have seen their dreams and fears come into being, transforming 
the world we all live in as they have done so. On the one hand online companies like 
Google & Facebook dominate the economy and our lives as the right libertarians wished 
while the spread of the internet into everyone's lives is bringing to an end the 
organisational models of the vanguardist left.

Section I will be of considerable interest to the general reader as it tries to answer the 
question 'What would an anarchist society look like?'. The goes from the specifics of 
anarchist economics, replies to the common capitalist attacks on anarchism, all the way to 
a detailed look at the largest attempt to put anarchism into practice on a mass scale, the 
Spanish Revolution. Much of this section is in fact an answer to the right libertarians 
and an explanation of how socialism & freedom would work together in practise. As 
elsewhere what is presented is not a single vision but rather the range of what anarchists 
have described how a free society might work.

Section J is based around the question 'What do anarchists do?' and covers key areas of 
organisation, direct action and involvement in social struggles. It is the closing section 
of the FAQ, if you include the Appendices (which have yet to appear in print form). Again 
this isn't a single perspective on what anarchists do, instead the various debates within 
anarchism and the contrasting forms of organisation anarchists advocate are sketched out.

???????????????The FAQ is not perhaps something to pick up and read cover to cover, that 
would be a long task. However, as well as skim reading it for the par- ticular questions 
you'd like to hear the answers to, I suspect it would probably also work well as
a tool for collective discussion and theoretical development by a group of people 
discovering or deepening their anarchism. It's not that I agree with everything it 
contains, but it does systematically bring together a vast body of knowledge and history 
in a very accessible form that can be the basis for many conversations.

Words: Andrew Flood