#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) #anarkismo.net: #Anarchism as a way of life by Zoe Baker

 In 1899 Malatesta wrote that "Anarchy can only come a little - slowly, but

surely, it is growing in intensity and expansion. Therefore, the issue is not
whether we complete Anarchy today, tomorrow or in ten centuries, but that we are
marching towards Anarchy today, tomorrow and always ". (Malatesta 2014, 300) ----
Anarchism as a way of life... by the libertarian communist Zoe Baker ---- In 1925
the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta wrote that: ---- Anarchy is a form of
coexistence in society. A society in which people live as brothers without being
able to oppress or exploit others and in which everyone has at their disposal
whatever means the culture of the time can offer, in order to achieve the maximum
possible moral and material development. .

And anarchism is the method of achieving anarchy, through freedom, without
government - that is, without those authoritarian institutions that impose their
will on others by force. (Malatesta 1995, 52)

In this passage Malatesta distinguishes between anarchy as a goal and anarchism
as a method of achieving this goal. One of the interesting features of
Malatesta's theory is that it views anarchy itself as both a goal and an ongoing
process.

It refers to anarchy as a "form of coexistence in society" that must be produced
and reproduced continuously over time, rather than as a static unchanging utopia.

This idea is clearly seen in the previous writings of Malatesta. In 1891 he wrote
that with the free union of all, he would create a social organization through
the spontaneous grouping of people according to their needs and likes, from the
low to the high, from the simple to the complex, starting from the most immediate
until it reaches in the most distant and general interests.

This organization would aim at the greatest good and complete freedom for all. It
would embrace all of humanity in a common brotherhood and would be modified and
improved as conditions changed and changed, according to the teachings of
experience. This society of free people, this society of friends would be
Anarchy. (Malatesta 2014, 128)

Given that anarchy is a society that will constantly change and improve over
time, it turns out that "Anarchy" is "above all, a method." This method is,
according to Malatesta, "the free initiative of all", "free agreement" and "free
association". (Malatesta 2014, 141, 142) These two claims are combined with the
view that anarchy, together with socialism, has as its basis, starting point and
essential environment the equality of conditions. Its beacon is solidarity and
freedom is its method. It is not perfection, it is not the absolute ideal, which
like the horizon recedes as fast as we approach it but it is the open road to
every progress and improvement for the benefit of all. (Cited in Turcato 2012,
56. For a different translation see Malatesta 2014, 143)

What Malatesta means by this is this: The starting point of Anarchy is a
stateless society without classes, in which the means of production belong
together and no individual has the institutionalized power to impose his will on
others through violence. This creates a situation in which people are no longer
subject to domination and exploitation by the ruling classes.

In addition, it establishes the real possibility for all people to do and be a
wide variety of different things, as their ability to act is no longer limited by
poverty, borders, government bureaucracy, the need to work for a capitalist for
to survive etc.

This equality of circumstances is the social basis from which people can
participate in a process of continuous effort towards the goal of universal human
cooperation at the social level and the formation of bonds of mutual support and
love at the level of today. In everyday life with friends, family, co-workers and
so on.

People living under anarchy will move towards the goal of solidarity through the
method of forming voluntary horizontal associations. These voluntary horizontal
associations will enter into free agreements with each other and create a
decentralized network capable of coordinating large-scale actions.

Although violence can sometimes be necessary to defend areas of cooperation from
external attacks or to overthrow the ruling classes, force cannot be used to
create cooperation between equals. If one tries to impose decisions on others by
force, then the result will not be solidarity but conflict, conflict and the
relationship of command and obedience.

Achieving real solidarity requires people to reach agreements that best suit all
involved and, therefore, must be established voluntarily.
This process of striving for solidarity through the method of freedom will lead
to a wide variety of experiments in different life forms.

Through a process of trial and error, people over time will create new social
structures and relationships that will do a superior job of maximizing the
equality, solidarity and freedom of humanity. These new social structures and
relationships, in turn, will lay the foundation from which future improvements
can be made and so on.

As Malatesta wrote in 1899, "anarchist ideals are. ... The experimental system
that was transferred from the field of research to that of social realization ".
(Malatesta 2014, 302).

Malatesta does not believe that the establishment of anarchy will happen
automatically or that people naturally create anarchy. Anarchy exists only if it
is consciously produced and reproduced by human action. As he wrote in 1897,
"Belief in a natural law, according to which harmony is automatically established
between people without any need to take conscious, deliberate action, is hollow
and is completely refuted by facts.

"Even if the state and private property are abolished, harmony does not come
automatically, as if nature were dealing with the blessings and misfortunes of
men, but rather requires the people themselves to create it." (Malatesta 2016, 81)
This thought was repeated by Malatesta in 1925. He wrote: "Anarchy ...... is a
human ambition which is not based on any true or supposed natural law, and which
may or may not arise according to the human will." (Malatesta 1995, 46)

If anarchy is a product of human will, then it follows that anarchy could end if
people choose to oppress others and establish relations of domination and
subordination. This is a danger that Malatesta was aware of. He wrote in 1899
that, "if one in a future society seeks to oppress another, the latter would have
the right to resist him and to fight for power by force."

Anarchy was therefore a society based on "freedom for all and all, without limit
except the equal freedom of others: and it does not mean that we embrace and
desire to respect the" freedom "of exploitation, oppression, command, which is
oppression and not freedom ". (Malatesta 2019, 148, 149).

A crucial aspect of reproducing anarchy as a social system, then, is to ensure
that relations of domination and exploitation do not arise in the first place and
that, if they do arise in some way, they will be quickly defeated. Malatesta did
not provide much detail on how to do this, as he believed that this was a
question that would be resolved through large groups of people involved in a
process of experimentation with different forms of correlation.

Modern anarchists can, however, look at anthropological evidence of how existing
powerless societies reproduce. They do not provide precise plans that we can
follow as a guide to building a free society, but they can be useful sources of
inspiration.

In addition, it should be borne in mind that some stateless societies are
hierarchical in other ways, such as men oppressing women or adults oppressing
children.

There is a tendency for people growing up in societies with states to assume that
the true or correct end point of human cultural evolution is the creation of a
society with a state. Those living in stateless societies are considered inferior
(primitive) people who failed to realize the best way of organizing society.

In response to this way of thinking, anthropologist Pierre Clastres suggested
that extreme societies should not be treated as stateless societies, but rather
as anti-state societies. That is, people do not live by chance in stateless
societies. Instead, they have developed political philosophies about the kind of
society they want to live in and have consciously created social structures to
ensure that a society without rulers reproduces.

Members of state societies have not failed to realize the potential of a society
in which a dominant minority imposes its will on all others through violence.
Instead, they deliberately chose to create a different kind of society. (Clastres
1989, 189-218) Clastres writes, in a language I find obsolete and problematic,
that primitive societies have no state because they deny it, because they deny
the division of the social body into sovereign and sovereign.

The policy of the Savages is, in fact, to constantly prevent the emergence of a
separate organ of power, to prevent the fatal encounter between the institution
of the leader and the exercise of power.

In primitive society, there is no separate organ of power, because power is not
separated from society: society, as a whole, retains power, to maintain its
indivisible being, to prevent the emergence of inequality between masters and
subjects in her body, between leader and tribe.... The denial of inequality and
the denial of separate power are the same, constant concern of primitive
societies. (Clastres 1994, 91)

This point has recently been examined in much greater depth by the anthropologist
Christopher Boehm. He argues that equal societies without status are "the product
of human expediency" and that "the immediate cause of equality is conscious and
that deliberate social control is intended to prevent the expression of
hierarchical tendencies". (Boehm 2001, 12, 60)

One of the main ways in which equal stateless societies achieve this is through
the use of horizontal decision-making processes, in which the group makes
collective decisions by consensus among all stakeholders. (Boehm 2001, 31, 113)
Any leader does not have the power to impose decisions on others through coercion
and must instead persuade others to act in a particular way only through
rhetorical ability.

This is usually accompanied by a variety of behavioral expectations that the
leader must adhere to in order to remain in place, such as a modest leader,
controlling his emotions, the ability to resolve disputes, and generosity.

The emphasis on generosity can be so strong that leaders are expected to share
large sums of their wealth with others, especially those in need. This often
results in leaders holding the smallest number of things in the entire team
because they have to give so many items to those in need. (Boehm 2001, 69-72)

Equal stateless societies have, in addition, developed various mechanisms to
respond to what Boehm describes as "upstartism". The term includes any behavior
that threatens the autonomy and equality of the group, such as bullying, selfish
greed, issuing orders, assuming superiority, committing acts of physical violence
and so on.

In order to apply the moral values of the community, members of an equal society
without a state will respond to the effort of guardianship with a wide range of
different social sanctions.

This includes, but is not limited to, criticism, gossip, public ridicule,
ignorance of what he wants to impose, expulsion, expulsion from the group, and
even, in some extreme cases, execution. Social sanctions apply to all team
members but especially to leaders. This is due to the fact that leaders are
subject to a greater degree of public control and are considered as one of the
main areas where relations of domination and subordination could emerge.

This, in turn, creates a situation where leaders, in order to maintain their
position and avoid sanctions, will display the socially anticipated behavior
expected of them, such as handing out huge sums of their items, even and if they
prefer not to do so. Therefore, the sanction system not only effectively deals
with acts of domination, but also reproduces the horizontal structure of the
group itself. (Boehm 2001, 3, 9-12, 43, 72-84)

The way in which members of equal societies without a state respond to
sovereignty can be subtle. Boehm cites the example of the Kung, who have
developed a variety of ways to deal with the problem of successful male hunters
who consider themselves superior to everyone else and are therefore more likely
to engage in dominance relationships, especially murder.

First, large game meat is shared equally among the group by the person believed
to have killed the animal. Praise for the killing does not go to the person who
dropped the actual killing arrow but instead to the owner of the first arrow that
hit the animal.

This will often not even be someone who went hunting because of the male hunters
who regularly exchange arrows with each other. This social system ensures that
hunting credit is randomized, unskilled or unlucky hunters are less likely to
envy other hunters, each team member has access to protein, and the more skilled
or lucky hunters are unable to easily use the hunt. fact, to develop power and
influence in others. (Boehm 2001, 46)

Second, Kung actively uses humor and social etiquette to ensure that successful
hunters are not placed on a pedestal. An anonymous Kung member explains this as
follows:

Say a man was hunting. He should not come home and announce like a braggart, "I
have killed a big animal in the bush!" He must first sit in silence, until I or
someone else comes to his fire and asks: "What did you see today?" He answers
quietly, "Oh, I'm not good at hunting. I saw absolutely nothing. Or .. maybe just
a small animal ". Then I smile at myself, because now I know he has killed
something big.

Even after the hunter acted on purpose as if he did not have much success, other
members of the group will make jokes about him and express their frustration. The
anonymous Kung member claims that when people go to pick up the dead animal they
will say things like,

'' Are you saying that you have dragged us so far, to make us carry the pile of
bones to your house? Oh, if I had known it was so thin I would not have come.
People, you think I left a nice day in the shadows for that. At home we may be
hungry, but at least we have nice cool water to drink. ''

The conscious motivation behind this behavior is explained by a therapist as follows:

When a young man kills a lot of meat, he thinks of himself as a leader or a great
man and considers the rest as his servants or subordinates. We cannot accept
that. We deny the one who boasts, because one day his pride will make him kill
someone. So we always talk about his meat as useless. In this way we cool his
heart and make him kind. (Cited in Boehm 2001, 45)

The Kung have, in other words, developed a complex social system based on their
political philosophy, which ensures the reproduction of an equal state society
and actively prevents the rise of domination among them.

It is important to note that Boehm's account of the Kung is based on research
conducted in the 1960s and early 1970s. Their society has changed significantly
since then. In 1975, anthropologist Patricia Draper claimed that the vast
majority of Kung-speaking people had abandoned their traditional way of hunting
and gathering and now lived in a subordinate and semi-squatting form, in or near
the farming villages of Bantu and Europeans. breeders.

A minority of a few thousand Kung still live by the traditional technique of
hunting and gathering. (Draper 1975, 79)

Although people living in industrial societies do not need to develop social
norms around successful hunters, we have our counterparts. For example,
successful influencers sometimes leave a reputation in their minds, consider
themselves superior to other people, and then treat others as inferior to them
and engage in acts of domination.

Of course, it happens that those of us who live today under the domination of
capitalism, the state, patriarchy, racism, etc., are probably far from achieving
anarchy on a social level.

We are not faced with the problem of reproducing anarchy as a stateless society
without classes. On the contrary, we face the challenge of living under
oppressive systems, while trying to apply the methods of anarchism to both our
close relationships with friends, family, partners, etc. as well as in social
movements aiming at the abolition of all systems of domination and exploitation.

To do this we must create horizontal social relations which, as far as possible,
are the same as those which would constitute anarchy.

In this way we can simultaneously (a) construct the world as we would like during
our struggle against the world as it is and (b) develop through a process of
experimentation in the present the real methods of organization, decision making
and correlation that people in the future could use to achieve the states of
things that characterize anarchy.

If, as Malatesta argued, "tomorrow can only develop today" (Malatesta 2014, 163),
then we must build organizations based on "the will and interest of all their
members" not just "tomorrow to meet" all the needs of social life "but also"
today for the purposes of propaganda and struggle ". (Malatesta 2019, 63)

In other words, we must engage in pre-determination politics or, to use
historical anarchist language, build "the embryo of the human society of the
future." (Graham 2005, 98. For more on preliminary policies see Raekstad and
Gradin 2020)

The pockets of freedom we manage to create within class society are not, of
course, anarchy. Anarchy is a social system in which all forms of class rule have
been abolished and socialism has been achieved. Therefore, we cannot say that
there is anarchy just because a horizontal union has been created within the cage
of capitalism and the state. (Malatesta 2016, 358-60)

Although horizontal unions within class society are not anarchy, they are the
means by which anarchy can be achieved. That is, horizontal unions should be
instruments of class struggle that unite workers together to gain immediate
improvements, such as higher wages or the cessation of the fossil fuel industry,
and ultimately overthrow the ruling classes.

Horizontal associations should, at the same time, be social structures consisting
of forms of activity that evolve their participants into people who are capable,
and pushed, to establish and reproduce anarchy.

For example, a group of workers form a tenants' union, use immediate action to
prevent their landlord from evicting them, and at the same time learn how to make
decisions in a general meeting. By changing the world, employees change
themselves at the same time.

Given the knowledge of both historical anarchist theory and modern anthropology,
a crucial aspect of laying the foundations from which anarchy could emerge in the
future is the establishment of effective methods for maintaining the horizontal
group. This includes at least,

(a) Deliberate structuring of organizations to ensure that they are
self-governing by their members, such as decision-making through general
assemblies in which everyone has the right to vote, coordination of large-scale
action through informal networks or formal federations; performance of specific
tasks, etc.

(b) Consciously developing a system of social sanctions that responds effectively
and proportionately to situations where a member is involved in what Boehm calls
compensation. This is especially necessary when people are trying to establish
themselves in positions of power at the top of an informal hierarchy or engage in
an act of domination.

One of the most important situations a team has to deal with effectively is when
one member is emotionally, physically or sexually abusing another person.
Furthermore, it is very important that each system of sanctions applied is not in
itself a new form of domination disguised as mere opposition to the domination of
others.

In summary, anarchy is a form of common life in society that must be created
consciously and intentionally and reproduced by human action. A crucial place to
do this is to develop social structures and relationships that maintain the
horizontal position of groups and prevent the emergence of new forms of
domination and exploitation.

Given modern anthropological evidence of how real existing stateless societies
reproduce, this will involve the development of social sanctions to respond to
what Boehm calls compensation. Although we do not currently live under anarchy,
we must create horizontal unions that engage in class struggle against the ruling
classes and predetermine the methods of organization, decision-making and
cooperation that would exist in a free society.

This includes developing effective sanctioning systems that respond appropriately
to behaviors that threaten the team's horizontal position. This, just like in
anarchy, will require a process of experimentation with different life forms to
understand which solutions really work and are compatible with anarchist goals
and values.

In 1899 Malatesta wrote that "Anarchy can only come a little - slowly, but
surely, it is growing in intensity and expansion. Therefore, the issue is not
whether we complete Anarchy today, tomorrow or in ten centuries, but that we are
marching towards Anarchy today, tomorrow and always ". (Malatesta 2014, 300)

Through the process of moving towards anarchy we must learn how to live as equals
in a free horizontal union and thus become fit to create a society without rulers
or subjects. I am sure we will make mistakes along the way, but these mistakes
must be seen as opportunities for learning and development, rather than as
reasons to abandon the path to anarchy. In the words of the Spanish anarchist
Isaac Puente,

Living in libertarian communism would be like learning to live. His weaknesses
and weaknesses will appear when you start. If we were politicians we would paint
a paradise full of perfections.

Being human and knowing what human nature can be like, we believe that humans
will learn to walk the only way they can learn: by walking.

Bibliography
-Boehm, Christopher. 2001. Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of isonomic
behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
-Clasters, Pierre. 1989. Society vs. the State: Essays in Political Anthropology.
New York: Zone Books.
-Clasters, Pierre. 1994. Archeology of Violence. Semi-text (e).
-Draper, Patricia. 1975. «! Kung Women: Contrasts in Sexual Egalarityism in
Foraging and Sedentary Contexts»in Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by RR
Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press.
-Graham, Robert. 2005. Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas,
Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE to 1939. Montreal: Black Rose Books).
- Malatesta, Henry. 1995. The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles 1924-1931.
Edited by Vernon Richards. London: Freedom Press.
- Malatesta, Henry. 2014. The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader.
Edited by Davide Turcato. Oakland, California: AK Press.
- Malatesta, Henry. 2016. A long and patient work: The anarchist socialism of
L'Agitazione 1897-1898. Edited by Davide Turcato. Chico, CA: AK Press.
- Malatesta, Henry. 2019. Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America 1899-1900. Edited
by Davide Turcato. Chico, CA: AK Press.
-Puente, Isaac. 1932. Liberal Communism.
-Turcato, Davide. 2012. Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta's Experiments
With Revolution, 1889-1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
-Raekstad, Paul and Gradin, Sofa Saio. 2020. Prefigurative Politics: Building
Tomorrow Today. Cambridge: Polity Press.

* source:
https://thefreeonline.wordpress.com/2021/10/06/anarchism-as-a-way-of-life-by-libertarian-communist-youtuber-zoe-baker/#more-86100
- https: //www.alerta.gr/archives/21460?

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